Abstract

INDIA-TURKEY RELATIONS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

SABIR KHAN

Volume: 5 Issue: 4 2015

Abstract:

India-Turkey bilateral relations have been friendly and cordial since ancient times. The two countries have similar cultures and civilisations, art and architecture, customs and cuisine. There was a close and regular interaction between Indian rulers and the Ottoman Empire. The activism and the ideology of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk made a deep impression on the Indian freedom struggle. Ataturk changed a traditional and conservative society into a modern one. The two great civilizations with no history of mutual conflict and contradiction were well placed to rapidly expand mutually beneficial ties in the economic, science and technology, political and societal arenas. In the cold war period, bilateral relations did not progress far because of ideological differences. But after the demise of the USSR, the adoption of liberalization changed the uni-polar world into a multi-polar world, and the two countries agreed to improve their bilateral relations from a constructivist paradigm to a realistic paradigm. At the same time, India and Turkey have a few irritants in their bilateral relations. India-Turkey relations stretch back to the ancient Vedic period. In the ninth and tenth centuries, many Turkic people arrived in India such as Mahmood Gazni, Mohammad Ghauri, Muhammad bin Kasim, etc. They changed India’s historical, political and societal relations.1 Iltutmish was the first Sultan of Delhi, followed by Balban and others. All of them acknowledged the supremacy of the Khalifa.2 Iltutmish’s coins and inscriptions, for example, bore the Khalifa’s name. The philosophy of Maulana Jelalettin Rumi found natural resonance in the subcontinent where tolerance and a cosmopolitan approach were already embodied in the sublime traditions of Sufism and the Bhakti movement.

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