The Indian Embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara is tellingly on one Cinnah Caddesi or ‘Jinnah Road’ – it’s not an innocent coincidence, as it never is, with Turkey. Remember, Turkey was the only country in the world (not Saudi Arabia, or even China) to oppose placing Pakistan under the ‘Grey List’ by the global terror watchdog agency, Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, remains the only leader (besides Pakistanis) to repeatedly conflate Kashmir and Palestine and raise it in the United Nations General Assembly.
Turkey and Pakistan’s Foreign Policy: Then & Now
Post-Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, Turkey started sliding into a bitter, insecure, and resentment-fueled identity that struggled to uphold the grandeur of the ‘Pasha’ (honorific bestowed on Mustapha Kemal, along with the title Ataturk – Father of the Turks).
Ironically, both Turkey and Pakistan are countries that their founding fathers would struggle to recognise today, and whose overt and boorish religiosity would militate against their own personal sensibilities.
Ataturk would revolt against inherent revisionism in renaming Turkey to Türkiye. He would recoil against the reclassification of its most famous monument ie, Hagia Sophia from a museum (as changed by Ataturk from a Mosque in 1935), to back to a Mosque in 2020. Ataturk would militate at the insistence and celebration of the metaphorical headscarf as a symbol of religious assertion in the 'new normal’ of Erdogan’s Türkiye!
Just as Mohammed Ali Jinnah or Qaid-e-Azam (Father of the Nation) would struggle to appreciate the metastasized country with a decidedly longer name that doesn’t exactly fit the bill of his speech at the Constituent Assembly (“…you are free to go to your temples….”) by morphing from a single word 'Pakistan’ to ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’. Not to mention a country with less than half of the land and people (read, Bangladesh), from what Jinnah knew it to be so.
Both countries have failed their foundational and dramatic arrival on the world stage, but as Pakistan stares at stark survival issues and acute inabilities – it is only Turkey with a relatively surviving economy, polity, 'voice’ and impact on the global highway that still plays the Agent Provocateur. And because of that, the Turkish ‘Non-Delight’ is a rotten dish routinely served by its enfant terrible, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey’s 'Anti-West’ Stand
Erdogan has practiced the unholy art of running with the hare and hunting with the hound – as a NATO 'ally’ (including a nuclear weapons base at Incirlik Air Base), Erdogan routinely rails at the ‘West’ and has no qualms about buying cutting-edge Russian weaponry, like the S-400 missile system, even as the Cold War freeze seems to have returned with the Russia-Ukraine war.
Turkey became the only NATO country not to join the sanctions against Russia – it wasn’t morality, ideology, or a sense of propriety but just old-fashioned realpolitik by the amoral Turkish strongman, Erdogan.
Now, in a shocking case of even further provocation, manufactured outrage, and very selective amnesia, Erdogan blamed the ‘West’ for “the massacre unfolding in Gaza” and added incredulously and unwarrantedly, “I reiterate that Hamas is not a terrorist organization”!
It is an extremist position that is not even adopted by other Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, etc, who are blaming Israel for the current escalation, but certainly not giving a clean chit to Hamas.
But the wily Erdogan is calculatedly and intentionally doing so, knowing that it would enhance the lionising of his own image, within the Ummah (Islamic World) – a project that he has undertaken to snatch and usurp the mantle of leadership within the Ummah, from rivals like Saudi Arabia.
In doing so, Erdogan glides over sectarian fault lines to make a common cause with Shiite Iran and with an equally eccentric Sheikhdom of Qatar, to diminish the Saudi hegemony. Any ‘pariahised’ cause or entity like supporting terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the undeniable terror ‘nurseries’ in Pakistan are par for the course, for the ultra-unhinged and ultra-ambitious, Recep Erdogan.
Enabling Polarisation
It is a proven fact that Hamas is an offshoot of the Salafi-Wahhabi Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is known to have funded terror groups like Al Qaida, Hamas, etc. It had triggered tectonic unrest as part of the ‘Arab Spring’ and has been explicitly banned as a terror group in countries like Egpyt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, etc, but not so by Turkey, which continues to support and legitimise its cause and infrastructure.
Earlier, almost all Sheikdoms had jumped on Qatar to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, but it had remained defiant as part of its own incorrigibility and misplaced sense of importance – it was only Turkey which jumped to Qatar’s aid to further snub the likes of Saudi Arabia.
Erdogan has mastered the art of polarisation and theatrical posturing, domestically and internationally, like few others.
From a veritable Trojan horse within NATO and OIC (Organisation of Islamic Countries) – he burnishes his electoral appeal with a combination of manipulation and guile that unbelievably allows him to get away despite an unprecedently shrinking economy, sinking Turkish Lira, crippling inflation, and surging tensions with Kurds, etc.
Autocratic Erdogan has mastered the game of sullying and inflaming a narrative when it is in its weakest or most vulnerable moment, only to out-size his own ‘voice’ and persona, therein.
Holding such questionable and Machiavellian positions affords Erdogan supposedly bargaining or intervention rights on global conflicts eg, with the rogues list like Hamas, Hezbollah, Pakistan, or even Vladimir Putin, but it is rarely ever used for any good purposes.
In the distractive midst and cover of his larger-than-life act, Erdogan goes about brutally suppressing any dissenting voice be it the Gulen Movement, Kurds, Secularists, etc, as he concurrently diminishes Turkey’s constitutional institutions with utter impunity.
Ataturk could only be turning in his grave at the fate of a nation that had once inspired and led so many ideas and possibilities within the Ummah, as well as on the world stage.
One of Ataturk’s most famous quotes is, “Eger big gun caresiz kalisaniz kurtarici beklemeyin, kurtarici kendiniz olun” (literally, if you find yourselves helpless one day, don't wait for a rescuer, be the rescuer yourself). While that is a timeless and pertinent message for Turks to heed to its Ataturk or Pasha to oust Erdogan – the world at large will have to endure the petty, regressive, and tripping politics of the Agent Provocateur called Erdogan, and his newly-minted, Türkiye!
(The author is a Former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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