With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly raising Indian atrocities in Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and his country backing Pakistan at the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) meeting in Paris, India has decided to give the cold shoulder to its ties with Turkey.
According to Khaleej Times, New Delhi has cancelled a two-day official visit to Ankara by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi at the end of this month, which would have been his first stand-alone visit to the country.
He was to have proceeded to Turkey from Saudi Arabia, where he is going on October 27-28 to attend a mega-investment summit.
The decision to cancel the visit to Turkey marks a low in relations between New Delhi and Ankara, which have never been very warm. Trade and defence cooperation were among the issues that were to be on the table during Modi’s Ankara visit, which had been agreed to in principle.
The Ministry of External Affairs was non-committal over the development. “The visit was never finalised so there is no question of cancellation,” reports an official as saying.
Modi had last visited Turkey during the G20 in Antalya in 2015. He had held a bilateral with Erdogan in Osaka, on the sidelines of the G20 in June this year. The Turkish leader had paid a two-day visit to India in July 2018.
However, Erdogan’s strong backing of Pakistan’s position on Kashmir and alleging widespread human rights violations by India during his speech at the UNGA last month has not gone down well with India.
In his speech, Erdogan had raised the issue of UN resolutions on Kashmir and alleged that “eight million people are stuck” in Kashmir due to revocation of special status. He had criticised the international community for failing to pay attention to the Kashmir issue.
At the end of September, at an event in Turkey to mark the building of a warship for Pakistan, Erdogan also said he would continue to flag the Kashmir issue on the world stage.
India is known to have cancelled an order for two naval ships it had inked with Turkey, in retaliation of Erdogan’s Kashmir comments.
At the FATF meeting too, Turkey and Malaysia, along with China, openly backed Pakistan last week, which was invaluable in getting Islamabad a lifeline of four months till February 2020 to “eliminate” money laundering and terrorist financing.
