India and Turkey rebuild ties despite Kashmir

India and Türkiye are doing a very familiar foreign-policy trick — fighting in public on one issue while quietly keeping the rest of the relationship alive. Kashmir is the obvious point of friction. Ankara keeps raising it in ways New Delhi hates. But the actual state-to-state relationship never fully froze, and through 2023 and 2024 both sides kept meeting and talking about business, transport, security, and investment. (mea.gov.in) ### What is the actual disagreement? (mfa.gov.tr) Kashmir. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly framed it as an issue that should be resolved with Pakistan and with attention to Kashmiri aspirations, including during and after his February 2025 Pakistan visit and again around the 2025 UN General Assembly. (mea.gov.in) India treats that as interference in an internal matter and has publicly called the remarks unacceptable. ### So why didn’t ties just collapse? Because states do not throw away useful relationships lightly. India is a huge market and a rising geopolitical player. Türkiye wants more trade, more investment, and a bigger footprint in Asia. (mea.gov.in) India, for its part, sees value in keeping a working line open to a major regional power that sits across important shipping and connectivity routes. That is why official readouts kept emphasizing trade, defence and security, civil aviation, and shipping even while the political temperature stayed uneven. ### What changed after the 2023 earthquake? The earthquake gave both sides a reset point. India sent rapid relief under Operation Dost, and Erdoğan later thanked Modi for that support during their September 2023 meeting in New Delhi. (thehindu.com) That did not erase the Kashmir dispute. But it created a practical reason to lower the temperature and re-open a more transactional conversation. Basically, disaster diplomacy gave both governments a face-saving bridge back to normal business. ### What does “rebuild ties” actually mean here? Not a grand reconciliation. More like selective repair. Modi and Erdoğan met on the sidelines of the G20 in New Delhi in September 2023 and again at COP28 in Dubai in December 2023. (mea.gov.in) India’s external affairs minister met Turkish counterparts in 2023 and again in July 2024. Those are not symbolic drop-bys — they are the machinery that keeps a relationship functioning. ### Is there real money behind this? Yes, even if the trade relationship is lopsided. Türkiye’s foreign ministry puts bilateral trade at $8.54 billion in 2024, after peaking above $12 billion in 2022. India mainly buys things like marble, sunflower oil, and steel scrap from Türkiye, while Türkiye imports mineral fuels, auto parts, aluminum, smartphones, and synthetic fibers from India. (narendramodi.in) That is not trivial trade, and it is enough to give both sides reasons not to let politics wreck everything. ### But didn’t 2025 make things worse again? Yes — publicly. Türkiye backed Pakistan diplomatically during the India-Pakistan crisis in May 2025, which triggered boycott calls in India and a tourism backlash. (mea.gov.in) So the relationship is not on some smooth upward slope. The better way to read it is this: ties improve, then Kashmir or Pakistan blows them off course, then both sides preserve the parts they still need. ### Why does this matter beyond the two countries? Because it is a good reminder that geopolitics is not one thing. A country can condemn you at the UN and still want your market, your airlines, your ports, or your investors. (mfa.gov.tr) India and Türkiye are not close allies. But they do not need to be. They just need enough overlap to keep compartmentalizing. ### Bottom line? The India-Türkiye story is not “dispute solved.” It is “dispute contained.” Kashmir keeps poisoning the politics. But trade, transport, and strategic utility keep pulling both governments back to the table. (mea.gov.in) (aa.com.tr)