Why Erdoğan’s Kashmir View Shouldn’t Define Turkey
The recent opinion essay in the UK-based Milli Chronicle titled “Soft Power or Soft Pressure? How Turkey is Weaponizing Narratives Against India” by strategic affairs expert Divya Malhotra offers a sharp and largely persuasive reading of Ankara’s evolving foreign-policy playbook.
By unpacking how Turkish leaders repeatedly foreground Kashmir on global platforms, Malhotra convincingly situates Turkey’s rhetoric within the broader grammar of narrative warfare and soft power.
Yet, while her diagnosis of the strategy is sound, the attribution of intent warrants a more careful distinction—between the Turkish state under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkey as a society with its own plural histories, solidarities, and sentiments toward India.
Such a distinction matters, not merely as an academic caveat, but because conflating state-driven ideological agendas with popular will risks misunderstanding both the source of the problem and the pathways toward resolution.
Erdoğan’s Ideology and the State’s Narrative Turn
There is little doubt that Turkey’s current posture on Kashmir aligns closely with Erdoğan’s political worldview. Since consolidating power in the last decade, Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have increasingly fused foreign policy with Islamist symbolism and neo-Ottoman ambition.
Speaking at forums such as the United Nations General Assembly and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Turkish leaders have sought to position Ankara as a moral voice for Muslim causes—from Palestine to Kashmir—often privileging emotive appeal over geopolitical nuance.
Malhotra is right to observe that this rhetoric echoes long-standing Pakistani narratives while eliding the realities of cross-border terrorism and insurgent violence.
Independent investigations, including reports by the DisinfoLab Fact-Checking Research Centre (DFRAC), have indeed documented Turkey-based media and NGO networks amplifying anti-India disinformation campaigns.
These are not accidental developments; they reflect a deliberate recalibration as traditional Gulf hubs tightened cooperation with New Delhi.
Yet to read this as a reflection of Turkish society at large is to mistake the conductor for the orchestra. Erdoğan’s Turkey is not synonymous with the Turkish people, nor with the country’s longer diplomatic tradition, which historically emphasized pragmatism over ideological crusading.
Turkey Beyond Erdoğan: Society, Culture, and India
Outside the corridors of power in Ankara, public attitudes toward India are strikingly different from the state’s confrontational rhetoric. India has long enjoyed cultural goodwill in Turkey, sustained through cinema, tourism, education, and people-to-people contact.
Bollywood films and Indian television serials have found enthusiastic audiences in Turkish households, a phenomenon examined in cultural studies journals and widely reported in Turkish media throughout the 2010s.
This underlying warmth was vividly demonstrated after the devastating earthquakes that struck southern Turkey in February 2023. India’s rapid humanitarian deployment under Operation Dost—which included search-and-rescue teams, medical units, and relief supplies—was met with widespread public gratitude.
Turkish citizens, civil-society volunteers, and local officials openly acknowledged India’s assistance, a response documented by Turkey’s national press and India’s Ministry of External Affairs alike.
These gestures matter because they reveal a reservoir of societal goodwill that runs counter to Ankara’s official posturing. They also underscore that Turkey’s narrative aggression is elite-driven, not organically rooted in public hostility toward India.
Soft Power Is Not a Monolith
Malhotra’s central argument—that Turkey has mastered the art of narrative diplomacy by mobilizing universities, think tanks, and civil-society platforms—is compelling. However, soft power is not inherently malign, nor is it uniformly controlled.
Many Turkish academics and journalists remain critical of Erdoğan’s foreign policy adventurism, particularly as it has isolated Turkey from traditional partners and strained its economy. Domestic opposition voices, from secular intellectuals to student movements, frequently contest the government’s instrumentalization of Muslim identity for geopolitical ends.
It is also worth recalling the late American scholar Joseph Nye’s original conception of soft power, which emphasized attraction rather than coercion. When soft power becomes overly prescriptive—flattening complex conflicts into moral binaries—it risks losing credibility.
Turkey’s activism on Kashmir may resonate in certain ideological echo chambers, but it has not translated into substantive diplomatic outcomes, nor altered India’s standing in major multilateral forums.
Why Nuance Strengthens India’s Response
Recognizing this distinction between Erdoğan’s agenda and Turkish society does not weaken Malhotra’s warning; it refines it. India’s challenge is not Turkey per se, but a specific ideological project anchored in Erdoğanism.
Treating Turkey as a monolithic adversary would inadvertently validate that project by hardening identities and closing off channels of engagement with more moderate constituencies.
A more effective Indian response would therefore combine strategic narrative engagement with societal outreach. This means countering disinformation with evidence and transparency, as Malhotra rightly urges, while simultaneously deepening academic, cultural, and humanitarian ties with Turkish civil society. Doing so deprives Ankara’s leadership of the ability to claim moral consensus at home and abroad.
In an era where perception often outruns fact, narrative power is indeed a strategic asset. But narratives are neither immutable nor universally accepted.
When a budget-session remark in Ankara becomes global talking-point ammunition, it reflects the ambitions of a particular leadership, not the sentiments of an entire nation. India’s task is to contest the former without alienating the latter.
The real danger lies not in Turkey’s people shaping global opinion against India, but in allowing Erdoğan’s ideological prism to define how Turkey itself is understood. By keeping that distinction clear, India can defend its sovereignty, protect its narrative space, and preserve the possibility of a more balanced relationship with a country whose society has repeatedly shown that it is not India’s adversary.
