Misplaced nationalism is costing India its global leverage

Travel bans, and visa restrictions are harming India’s global image and people-to-people relations

Nearly six months after Operation Sindoor, it is time to insulate foreign policy from travel agents, airlines, and foreign tour promoters. Foreign policy should be left to diplomats. For the second time in five years, India’s soft power is under threat from an overreach of nationalism.

Last weekend, The Indian Express published an in-depth report detailing a one-third drop in Indian visitors to Türkiye during the four months following the four-day military conflict in May between India and Pakistan. This was the result of a call to boycott Türkiye — and Azerbaijan — to which tour service providers and travel aggregators supplied the muscle. This is not their job. They are exceeding their mandate. The comparative fall in Indian tourist traffic to Azerbaijan was higher at 56 per cent.

On August 29, this column reported the damage to Indian tourism by stopping tourist visas to Chinese passport-holders after a fatal military encounter in Ladakh in 2020. China did not reciprocate by stopping visas to Indians, and gained from that decision. India resumed giving visas to Chinese tourists on July 24. But damage has been done to people-to-people relations by ill-advised domestic anti-China campaigns on the popular plane. This will mean India will miss the jackpot of well-heeled tourist inflow from China for the foreseeable future.

Türkiye’s stock is rising, not only in Washington, now being minted anew in President Donald Trump’s persona, but all over the crisis-prone West Asia, including the Gulf. This year’s diplomatic report card so far demonstrates that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yielded ground to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in geographical areas that are vital for India.

At the October 13 Gaza Peace Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, attended by nine presidents, three monarchs, and 12 prime ministers, India was the only country to have been represented by a Minister of State for External Affairs, who is not even a member of the Cabinet. Japan was represented by its Ambassador to Saudi Arabia only because the country was in the middle of electing a prime minister.

The mismanagement of India-Turkish ties should not have led to a situation where New Delhi virtually ran away from an important global summit because Erdogan was the star in Sharm El-Sheikh, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was constantly by Trump’s side.

What discomfits the current Indian political leadership about Erdogan is that he is the other side of the Modi coin, so to speak. Just as Modi invokes India’s heritage and history to press his case, Erdogan invokes Türkiye’s Ottoman-era glory. If Islamism marks out Erdogan’s Türkiye, he has also successfully made peace with the secular legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Türkiye’s founder. Erdogan has not forced women in his approximately 85% Muslim country to wear the veil. In many Indian states, on the other hand, anyone can be sent to jail for possession of beef.

India finds it hard to reconcile Erdogan’s growing global relevance, even though he refused to visit the White House for six years until last month. That included part of Trump’s first term and the entire Joe Biden presidency. Türkiye also gets away as the third-biggest purchaser of Russian oil and has cocked a snook at Russia-baiters with its purchase of S-400 missile systems. Like Modi, Erdogan also practices strategic autonomy.

All this should ideally be a recipe for partnership between India and Türkiye on the global stage. Such a partnership was what two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders of the previous generation achieved — Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister and L K Advani as deputy prime minister. Advani’s visit to Türkiye in 2001 was the culmination of the Vajpayee government’s efforts to get out of the Pakistan obsession on both sides in India-Türkiye ties. Just like Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao buried Iran’s Pakistan obsession with thoughtful policies.

Unfortunately, everything is back to square one after Operation Sindoor. On July 4, the Army’s Deputy Chief, Lt Gen Rahul R Singh bracketed Türkiye along with Pakistan and China as an adversary during the fighting in May. The questions which deserve a practical answer are: will India’s decisions to end academic collaboration with Turkish institutions make Erdogan change his mind about friendship with Pakistan, which is not new? Did it make any sense to cancel a well-considered and comprehensive multi-billion-dollar contract that enabled Türkiye to build ships in Visakhapatnam for the Indian Navy? Türkiye has strengths in this sector, and it only aids Pakistan if the construction of Indian naval ships on competitive terms is delayed or abandoned.

Nationalism is a double-edged sword. Türkiye is an example of how misplaced nationalism can harm India.

K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).