India rebuilds ties with Turkey

Diplomacy is the story here — and the point is not that India and Turkey suddenly became friends again. The point is that they decided to start talking normally again. On April 8, India and Türkiye held their 12th Foreign Office Consultations in New Delhi, the first such round since 2022, with India’s Sibi George and Türkiye’s Berris Ekinci leading the talks. ### What actually changed? The concrete shift was procedural but important. These were formal government-to-government consultations, not a quick handshake on the sidelines of a summit. Both sides reviewed the full relationship and discussed trade, investment, tourism, technology, energy, education, culture, people-to-people ties, and cross-border terrorism. That is what a reset looks like in real life — not a grand declaration, but a decision to reopen the whole file. (publicnow.com) ### Why had ties gone bad? Kashmir and Pakistan are the core problem. Relations were already touchy because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had repeatedly raised Kashmir in ways India saw as backing Pakistan. Then things got worse after the 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, when Ankara publicly supported Islamabad during India’s Operation Sindoor. In India, that triggered a political backlash, business scrutiny, and calls to boycott Turkish tourism and products. (publicnow.com) ### Was there real economic damage? Yes — enough to get attention, but not enough to break the relationship. Indian reporting said tourist arrivals from India to Türkiye fell 36% in June 2025 from a year earlier after the backlash. Trade also slipped. One India trade tracker puts bilateral trade at $8.71 billion in FY25, down from the roughly $10.4 billion level cited for FY24. That is not collapse. But it is a visible hit. (thehindu.com) ### So why talk now? Because both countries still have reasons to keep the channel open. India and Türkiye are G20 economies with a long diplomatic relationship going back to 1948. They already have a working history on trade, investment, civil aviation, shipping, and security issues, and their leaders have kept meeting at multilateral gatherings even when politics ran cold. Basically, the relationship never disappeared — it just became harder to use. (thehindu.com) ### Is this a full reconciliation? No — and that is the part worth understanding. This looks more like compartmentalization than reconciliation. India is not dropping its objections to Turkey’s Pakistan tilt, and Turkey is not abandoning Pakistan. But both sides seem willing to keep economic and diplomatic business moving in parallel with those disagreements. That is a very common middle-power move: contain the dispute, preserve the useful parts. (mea.gov.in) ### Why does the four-year gap matter? Because it shows the thaw is deliberate. The last round of consultations was in June 2022 in Ankara, so restarting them in April 2026 was not routine calendar maintenance. It was a choice to resume a format that had gone dormant through a rough period. When governments revive a channel after years, they are signaling that managing the relationship is now worth the effort again. (thehindu.com) ### What is the catch? The catch is that the strategic mistrust is still there. Turkey’s closeness with Pakistan remains a red line for New Delhi, and India’s own regional alignments do not naturally pull Ankara and New Delhi together. So this reset has limits. It can support trade and routine diplomacy, but it probably cannot erase the Kashmir dispute as the main political drag. That last part is an inference from the pattern of talks and the issues both sides still carry. (publicnow.com) ### Bottom line? India and Turkey are rebuilding working ties, not solving their biggest disagreement. The news is the return of structured diplomacy after a bad year. The deeper story is more pragmatic — both governments seem to have decided that even a tense relationship is better managed than frozen. (middleeasteye.net)