Honestly, I feel deeply pained to see marauding gangs of people stripping down the India-Türkiye relationship. My tryst with Türkiye began one evening in mid-1998 when Foreign Secretary K Raghunath, an erudite mind in the pantheon of successful bureaucrats, told me he intended to propose to the prime minister my name as the next ambassador to Türkiye.
The secretary said Türkiye’s ‘pro-Pakistan’ stance was annoying and I, as someone who had served at the Pakistan desk in South Block all through my career, might make a difference. Raghunath went on to reflect on Türkiye’s glorious Ottoman history and astute statecraft through the ages to underscore that a pathway could be cut through the thicket full of weeds with dexterity and sensitivity.
I hit the ground running in Ankara. During the customary tête-a-tête after presentation of my letter of credentials, President Süleyman Demirel came straight to Kashmir issue. I sensed the foxy veteran politician was testing me with a dollop of shock and awe. But I calmly iterated the official line and proceeded to speak about my brief to promote economic ties, hoping I’d catch the attention of Demirel, who had pursued a policy of economic growth in spite of civil violence and terrorism from extremist factions, inflation and a trade deficit. Demirel instinctively warmed up. And we ended up talking about our fondness for cashew nuts.
Lesson 1: It’s the economy, stupid! One great thing about the Indian Foreign Service is that an ambassador is allowed a lot of latitude to navigate his way in the country of his accreditation. Some two months into my assignment, I sought a courtesy call on my Pakistani counterpart, a retired four-star general from Lahore—something none of my predecessors had cared to do, as he recollected later. At the end of a cordial conversation, we agreed that it made no sense to fight over Kashmir in the valleys and hills of Anatolia. He kept his word; so did I.
Lesson 2: Don’t get entrapped in Pakistan-centric diplomacy. Towards the end of my first year in Ankara, I mooted a Turkish-Indian friendship group and invited legislator Abdullah Gül (later president), Recep Erdoğan’s close ally and co-founder of the Islamist AKP, to head it. Gül welcomed the idea and the Islamic circles took note.
Lesson 3: Islamism defines Türkiye. In my second year, I struck a warm friendship with a remarkable aristocrat with rich experience in Türkiye’s politics whose father was a general and aide to Kemal Atatürk in the 1919-23 war of independence—Altemur Kılıç. One languid summer afternoon after lunch, as we continued our conversation on Turkish politics, he fished out from the library in his villa on the Bosphorus a slim volume in Turkish, dog-eared and yellowing—a Turkish translation of Gitanjali by Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit when he was a student at Cambridge! No one had ever told me about the existence of such a work, although Ecevit was a politician, statesman, poet, writer, scholar and journalist who served as prime minister four times between 1974 and 2002.
I felt a magical moment. As the Merc speeded through the Bolu Mountains to Ankara with my prized possession, I knew I was holding a key that would open the door to a rose garden. Weeks later, when PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee came across the leather-bound bilingual luxury edition of Gitanjali, which was released by Ecevit himself at a grand function of elites and the diplomatic corps at Hilton Ankara, he promptly extended an invitation to Ecevit to be his guest in India and had I K Gujral, in his capacity as the chancellor of Vishwa Bharati University, to confer a D Litt on the visiting dignitary in Shantiniketan.
Lesson 4: No road is long with good company. When President Pervez Musharraf came to know that Ecevit was travelling to India, he tried to persuade him to add Pakistan to the itinerary. But Ecevit politely declined, saying he wanted it to be a ‘standalone’ experience, intensely personal, as India always had a special place in his heart.
Lesson 5: There’s a fountainhead of goodwill towards India despite decades of neglect. The biggest lesson I learnt was Turkish elites neither insisted on turning Kashmir into a bilateral discord, nor were obsessed with an India-Pakistan binary. Ecevit’s visit imparted the gravitas needed to transform my conversations with the Turkish foreign office and elites.
Later in my term, the pendulum swung skyward—growing business ties to intelligence-sharing. The Turks had a special envoy to the Taliban government, a great friend who was a frequent visitor to Kandahar, where the reclusive Mullah Omar lived, and I copiously reported to Delhi. A first-ever four-day visit by Deputy PM and Home Minister L K Advani to Türkiye (accompanied by then IB chief Ajit Doval) and a similar visit by R&AW chief A S Dulat happened.
So, what went wrong? Notably, the momentum created in the late 1990s propelled the relationship right up to end-2023, when a $2.3-billion contract was signed with the TAIS consortium for consultancy, technology transfer and engineering support to build ships for the Indian Navy at Visakhapatnam.
Evidently, our abrupt TAIS cancellation touched some raw nerves in Ankara. The Turkish defence industry, far more advanced than India’s, is anchored on public-private partnerships. Baykar, which manufactures advanced drones, is owned by relatives of President Erdoğan. Such occurrences are not uncommon. After all, cancellation of the $511-million contract for an influential Indian corporate house to modernise and operate the Male airport eventually cost President Abdulla Yameen his job.
Türkiye is a great trading nation. In the Ottoman era, the Sultan encouraged settlements of Jews fleeing Europe in the Levant, to create wealth. Alas, we could have compensated for the TAIS cancellation. Instead, we’ve descended from the sublime to the absurd by promoting the ‘Boycott Türkiye’ sentiment in the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre. JNU and Jamia Millia Islamia suspended cooperation with Turkish counterparts, FIEO embargoed Turkish delegations, and vendors cancelled orders for Turkish goods. We’ve lost our sense of proportions.
This theatre of the absurd isn’t going to change Türkiye’s stance on Kashmir. After all, Türkiye has chosen to inherit the caliphate. Faced with a similar predicament, Beijing took Erdoğan on an excursion to Xinjiang—he returned a changed man who talks less about Uighur Muslims’ problems and more about China as an investor and trading partner.
M K Bhadrakumar,
Former diplomat
(Views are personal)