The strengthening multi-lateral cooperation between Turkey and Bangladesh is a cause of worry for India. From agriculture, petrochemicals, to defence and intelligence, Ankara is pouring money, materiel, technology, and ideas into Dhaka.
Industrial ties picked up pace in 2019, when Arçelik, the household appliances manufacturer, acquired a 57% stake in Singer Bangladesh. The defense & security relations between the two have been on an upswing post the fall of Sheikh Hasina, and the rise of historical revisionism as well as Jammat-e-Islami.
Turkey is synergizing between soft power, ideological affinity, as well as financial and trade ties. The TV show Ertugul is quite popular in Bangladesh and the broader Islamic world.
Erdogan-ruled Turkey is well known for neo-Ottoman delusions and exporting of Turkic identity as well as its variant of pan-Islamism. Turkey often positions itself as a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, on one hand, and the West and Russia on the other.
In Bangladesh, it will further augment the China-Pakistan axis and thereby deepen what Samuel P. Huntington termed the Sinic-Islamic convergence.
The Revivalist Dreams of Turkey
In 1853, Tsar Nicolas I of Russia, during a conversation with the British Ambassador, coined the term ‘Sick Man of Europe’ for the declining Ottoman Empire. From then on, till the Khilafat Movement in 1920s undivided India, the quest to first reconstruct and then resurrect this empire have fuelled pan-Islamist nightmares and fantasies.
Allama Iqbal, who was opposed to the Khilafat Movement, later considered Turkey as the model-state for Islamic revivalism. For decades, Turkey drifted between military rule and democracy, and between orienting towards the West, or reviving its past. With Erdogan, the confusion has been resolved.
A permanent member of NATO, as well as a leader of the Organisation of Turkic States, Turkey has hedged its bets on all sides in a region marked by chequered and contested loyalties.
“Having rejected Mecca, and being rejected by Brussels, Turkey seized the opportunity opened by the dissolution to turn towards Tashkent. President Özal and other Turkish leaders held out the vision of a community of Turkic people’s and made great efforts to develop links with external Turks in Turkey’s near abroad stretching from the Adriatic to the borders of China”, writes Samuel P. Huntington in the Clash of Civilizations in 1993.
Sultanat-e-Bangla
In 2019, the Turkish government launched Asia Anew initiative which aims to “introduce a new vision into her policies towards the continent from a comprehensive and holistic perspective”, as per Ankara’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For a host of reasons, going back hundreds of years, no country is more suitable than Bangladesh. The Central Asia stans, wedged between Russia and China, and ruled by post-Soviet leaders, cannot offer what Bangladesh has – the perfect cocktail of ideology, history, and shared revivalist dreams.
A Turkish funded NGO, Sultanat-e-Bangla, reportedly circulated ‘greater Bangladesh maps’.
Sultanat-e-Bangla is the Urdu for the Bengal Sultanate, which existed from 1352-1576. The Bengal Sultanate had thriving trade and cultural ties with the Ottoman Empire.
Chittagong, a medieval maritime centre, was known for its shipbuilding industry that supplied ships to the Ottoman naval fleet. Research papers from Turkish universities emphasize the historical relations between the Ottoman Empire and Bengal Sultanate.
There’s a Turkish Honorary Consulate in Chittagong, investment in the local poultry sector, and now reports of joint weapons production and special economic zone being setup.
The Turkics were also overrepresented among the cultural, political, and administrative elite in Bengal.
The foundation of Islamic rule in Bengal was laid a century before the Bengal Sultanate, by Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkic soldier-adventurer turned governor. He’s the same arsonist who ransacked the ancient centre of learning at Nalanda, which predated Bologna, Oxford, and Cambridge. It is said that the library at Nalanda had such an enormous collection of books that they kept on burning for three months.
Ties that Bind Turkey and Bangladesh
The causal link between Bakhtiyar Khilji and Bengal Sultanate conjures the imagination of the modern-day street hooligans of Jamaat. It is the fount of Greater Bangladesh revanchist vision, identity complex, and Islamist hubris that connects Islamabad and Dhaka.
Muslim League, the vehicle of Muslim separatism in the Indian subcontinent, was founded in 1906, not in Aligarh or Lahore, but in Dhaka. The founding patron was Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dhaka, also the founder of the city’s University. His grandson, Khwaja Nazimuddin, served as the second Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Blood is thicker than water, and the ties that bind the Islamists of Bangladesh and Pakistan are deeper and older than that.
‘In civilizational conflicts, unlike ideological ones, kin stand by their kin’, said Huntington. Here ideology, culture, and civilizational zeal all align. After a hearty meal of Dhaka Biryani, the Islamists can savour dollops of Turkish delight too. India’s dilemma, meanwhile, has only compounded.
