India Between Revisionism and Realignment

Analysis

By Zahid Sultan and Irshad Ahmad Bhat

In the theatre of global politics, symbolism often speaks louder than tanks, and alliances are forged less in treaties than in shared discomfort with the prevailing order. The emerging convergence between Ankara and Islamabad belongs to this grammar of geopolitics—an entente not born of geographic necessity or economic logic, but of a shared sense of civilizational grievance and geopolitical liminality. It is not an alliance in the Westphalian mould, but a mutual accommodation between two states whose aspirations often outpace their capacities, and whose postures betray a certain restlessness with their assigned roles in the global hierarchy.

Turkey and Pakistan are not natural allies. Their strategic compulsions differ, their histories are dissimilar, and vastly different civil-military dynamics shape their institutional logics. Yet, what binds them today is less policy than posture—a revisionist impulse dressed in the language of Islamic solidarity, and a shared desire to carve out sovereign space in a world that appears increasingly ordered by club-like coalitions of the powerful.

India finds itself implicated in this convergence not by choice, but by the force of narrative and geography. The recent reports of Turkish-origin drones entering Indian airspace—reportedly over 300 UAVs, including models manufactured by Asisguard—are not mere technical provocations. They are symptomatic of a deeper entrenchment of military cooperation between Turkey and Pakistan, one that operates beneath the radar of formal alliances yet alters the deterrence landscape of South Asia. The docking of a Turkish anti-submarine corvette in Karachi, alongside the nearly concurrent landing of a C-130 military aircraft, signals more than routine defence exchanges; they indicate the consolidation of a strategic vocabulary between two powers who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are being encircled and ignored.

Erdoğan’s Turkey has become an increasingly agile geopolitical actor, capable of leveraging its post-Ottoman civilizational identity into a form of diplomatic leverage. Its assertiveness in the Eastern Mediterranean, its calibrated defiance of NATO orthodoxy, and its willingness to embrace unlikely allies—from Russia to Qatar to Somalia—indicate a country deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Pakistan, meanwhile, has sought in Turkey not just a partner, but an alternative to its deepening dependency on Beijing and its estrangement from the West. What Turkey offers Islamabad is not only weapons and technology, ranging from drone warfare to submarine upgrades, but something more elusive: the comfort of ideological recognition and geopolitical fraternity.

This fraternity has taken a particularly sharp form when it comes to India. Erdoğan’s repeated invocation of Kashmir on international platforms is neither casual nor costless. It reveals a calculated effort to position Turkey as a voice of Muslim causes, not only to its domestic electorate, but to a wider transnational audience that sees the fate of Kashmir as a litmus test of international double standards. That this rhetoric has remained untempered even in the face of India’s humanitarian aid during Turkey’s 2023 earthquake is telling. It confirms what ought to be analytically self-evident: gestures of goodwill rarely suffice to alter ideologically embedded foreign policies.

India, however, is not without agency. In responding to this entente, New Delhi has moved not with bluster but with quiet recalibration. Its growing closeness with Armenia and Greece—two states with deep historical and strategic anxieties about Turkey—is not coincidental. Nor is its assertive posture in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Indian support for Cyprus has added a new layer to its evolving European diplomacy. Even more significant is the strategic intimacy cultivated with the Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who have drifted away from the moralistic binaries of the Islamic world and moved closer to India, drawn by shared economic interests and a pragmatic disdain for Erdoğan’s revivalist politics.

There is, in this, an important lesson about how India is learning to operate in a world where alignments are no longer dictated by ideology or legacy, but by the granular convergence of interest and narrative control. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor—unveiled with much fanfare at the G20 Summit—is a case in point. By bypassing Turkey and anchoring the route in Gulf capitals, the project symbolically displaces Ankara’s self-image as the geographic and civilizational bridge between East and West. That Erdoğan has responded with his own alternative—the Iraq Development Road—is less an act of infrastructural vision than of geopolitical signalling, a declaration that Turkey will not be written out of Asia-Europe connectivity without a fight.

And yet, there is a risk here for India: the temptation to view the Turkey-Pakistan convergence solely through the lens of enmity. This would be analytically impoverished. For beneath their rhetorical aggression lies a deeper structural insecurity—about marginalization, about dignity, about relevance. These are not states bent on conquest, but polities navigating the contradictions of ambition and capacity in an unequal world order. Their solidarity, in many ways, is a search for voice in a system that too often pretends neutrality while perpetuating hierarchy.

This is why India’s challenge is not merely to out-arm or out-align its adversaries. It is to develop a strategic imagination expansive enough to encompass both firmness and finesse. India must remain unapologetic in defending its interests and in countering revisionist narratives concerning Kashmir or the regional order. However, it must also invest in the more difficult task of narrative leadership—making its rise not solely a story of economic figures or defence acquisitions, but of a new ethics of international engagement—one that addresses justice, plurality, and sovereign dignity without descending into the overreach of civilisational exceptionalism.

As C. Raja Mohan has rightly argued, the time for reactive nationalism has passed. India’s rise will be measured not by the volume of its denunciations but by the architecture of its responses. The Ankara-Islamabad entente may not upend the balance of power, but it does remind us that in the theatre of world politics, posture and perception are as powerful as policy. And in that theatre, India must not only act—but perform—with strategic clarity, quiet confidence, and moral seriousness.

Disclaimer: This paper is the author's individual scholastic contribution and does not necessarily reflect the organization's viewpoint. 

By: Zahid Sultan (Freelance Researcher.  PhD in Politics and Governance from Central University of Kashmir. 

Irshad Ahmad Bhat (Pursuing PhD in Political Science)