and CNSS

On 18 November 2025, while presenting the 2026 budget in Ankara’s parliament, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan once again raised the Kashmir issue, urging international intervention and dialogue under global oversight. The statement sparked little surprise not because it was benign, but because it fits a familiar pattern.

Over the past decade, Turkey has consistently used major global platforms, from the UN General Assembly to the OIC to national parliamentary debates, to position itself as a defender of Muslim causes worldwide, with Kashmir serving as a recurring rhetorical centerpiece.

Fidan’s remark was not an impulsive comment on a routine parliamentary day. It was another installment in Ankara’s long game of narrative diplomacy; a strategic campaign to shape how conflicts are perceived worldwide through emotional, identity-based framing rather than balanced geopolitical reasoning.

Soft Power and Narrative Warfare: A defining feature of Turkey’s foreign policy under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the deployment of soft power instruments: universities, think-tanks, diaspora groups, cultural bodies, and civil-society platforms, to construct and amplify narratives sympathetic to Ankara’s ideological and geopolitical positions.

These platforms allow Turkey to frame complex conflicts such as through simplified moral binaries: oppressed versus oppressor, victim versus aggressor, without any reference to state-sponsored terrorism.

Indeed, reports by independent fact-checkers such as DFRAC identified media organisations based in Turkey (and in Gulf-region media-ecosystems including Qatar) as active participants in anti-India disinformation efforts: suggesting that this campaign extends well beyond South Asia and aims to shape perceptions among Muslim audiences globally.

Turkey is now being described as ‘the new Dubai’ for anti-India influence operations, indicating that as Gulf states tightened their cooperation with India, Ankara repositioned itself as a hub for media, NGO-sponsored, and diaspora-led narrative outreach targeting Indian Muslims and the broader Muslim world.

This narrative strategy has been particularly visible in Turkey’s activism on Kashmir. Conferences, public lectures, solidarity campaigns, and academic delegations in events hosted by Istanbul university, Institute for Strategic Thinking (SDE) and Ankara-based thinktank ESAM have frequently depicted Kashmir not as a multifaceted political and security challenge but as a humanitarian catastrophe demanding global intervention.

Such narratives often mirror Pakistan’s long-standing line, while omitting crucial realities: cross-border terrorism, Pakistan-sponsored insurgency, and decades of targeted violence against civilians and security forces.

A Narrative Vacuum Waiting to Be Filled: A core factor enabling the spread of these narratives is the limited global understanding of India’s internal security landscape including Kashmir and left-wing extremism. In the absence of nuanced knowledge, simplified and emotive accounts travel faster and take deeper root.

Soft-power messaging thrives on precisely this gap; as American political scientist (late) Joseph Nye observed, “power is the ability to get others to want what you want.” In today’s world, what others believe is often more consequential than what is objectively verifiable.

By mobilizing academic and civil-society voices as independent moral arbiters, Turkey gains plausible deniability, allowing state-aligned narratives to be projected through apparently neutral channels. When repeated across respected international platforms, these positions accumulate what political scientists call normative legitimacy; the power to define what is seen as “just,” “acceptable,” or “morally right.”

Once embedded, such perceptions can influence diplomatic decisions, resolutions in multilateral bodies, and broader public opinion.

Why does It Matter for India and India’s Options?

India cannot afford complacency. External narratives have domestic consequences when they shape expectations, policy environments, and diplomatic costs. Allowing another state to repeatedly frame Kashmir as an international dispute rather than an internal constitutional question risks legitimizing external interference in India’s sovereign domain.

Moreover, narrative asymmetry creates a structural disadvantage when one side dominates the language of morality and human rights, the other risks being cast defensively, forced to justify rather than articulate. Emotional rhetoric consistently outpaces empirical analysis, and global politics increasingly rewards speed, sentiment, and symbolism.

This is not about silencing criticism; democracies must welcome scrutiny. But critique must be grounded in full context, not curated fragments that erase terrorism, glorify violence, or recast insurgents as liberators. A debate divorced from reality becomes political theatre rather than principled engagement.

The answer is not reactionary counter-propaganda. It is strategic narrative engagement: building credible visibility in global academic and diplomatic spaces, fostering research partnerships, investing in international outreach, and supporting evidence-based scholarship. India must tell its story with clarity, not defensively, but assertively, through transparent, well-structured public diplomacy.

India must also insist on transparency regarding funding and affiliations in international think tanks and civil-society organizations participating in discourse on South Asian conflicts. Legitimacy cannot be built upon undisclosed interests.

Conclusion

In an age where perception competes with reality, narrative power has become a strategic asset. Words can move resolutions, shift alliances, and determine how conflicts are judged before facts are even examined. When a budget-session remark in Ankara becomes global talking-point ammunition, it signals that narrative warfare is no longer peripheral: it is geopolitical statecraft.

India cannot allow others to define its story. If we do not articulate our truth with coherence, evidence, and confidence, we risk being defined by those whose agendas are anything but impartial. The choice before India is clear: shape the narrative or be shaped by it.

Centre for National Security Studies (CNSS) is a well-known thinktank in the area of National Security Studies, under Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bangalore (India).

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

True commitment to justice means standing with all oppressed people, regardless of faith—not just those who resemble us.

The Palestinian struggle has metamorphosed from a national liberation movement into a cause increasingly espoused by Islamists of all hues and ideologies. While it remains deeply emotional and significant for Muslims worldwide, this shift has introduced confusion—especially when difficult questions are raised about the political and ideological framing of the issue.

The narrative that Islamist intellectuals have carefully constructed begins to collapse like a house of cards when confronted with uncomfortable questions—questions often left unanswered or deliberately obscured. But why ask such questions at all? Isn’t this just whataboutery?

Yes, it can be. But when used sincerely, whataboutery is a way to scratch the bottom and understand a position that one was trying to hide behind large words and sophisticated vocabulary.

Since October 7, many Muslims have declared, “To stand with Gaza is to stand with humanity.” This frames the Palestinian struggle as a universal moral issue—transcending religion and nation. Yet in the same breath, many ask, “Where are the Arab and Muslim countries?”

Wait—if this is a humanitarian crisis, why appeal to Arab regimes that are openly complicit with imperialist powers? And if the call is rooted in ummah and religious solidarity, then why invoke the language of universal humanity?

At the rhetorical level, it’s about “humanity”; but at a deeper level, it’s clearly framed as a crisis of the ummah, to the exclusion of others. The contradiction reveals a fundamental confusion—not just about Palestine, but about many critical questions facing Muslims today.

Should Israel be opposed as part of religious faith or for its actions in Gaza? The answer, often, is both. Is the Jewish people an eternal enemy, or is the enmity grounded in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians? The line is blurred.

Many cheer when Israelis—soldiers or civilians—are killed, making no moral distinction. The now-viral meme “Of course I support LGBT: Let’s Go Bomb Tel Aviv” is not just tasteless; it’s a genocidal fantasy, echoing cries for a second Holocaust. Forget soldiers—there is often no concern even for Israeli children, while outrage for Palestinian children is rightfully widespread.

This selective empathy, this moral hypocrisy, stains the integrity of the cause. And unless we confront it honestly, we risk replacing one injustice with another.

Not all people living in Israel, and certainly not all Jewish people, are complicit in the “genocide”. There are Jewish voices who have spoken-up against Israel’s far-right groups. But where are the Muslim equivalents of such Jewish voices? Where are the visible Jewish-Muslim brotherhood platforms actively resisting antisemitism and calling for hating the oppression and not the jewish people in letter and Spirit?

The increasing Islamization of the Palestinian cause has effectively narrowed the space for such solidarity to emerge from the Muslim side. Instead of expanding the struggle into a broader coalition for justice, it has been boxed into religious identity and issue—shrinking the possibility of building alliances that transcends faith and can talk about pressing issues .

Muslims must reconsider the nature of their solidarity—moving beyond a reaction rooted solely in religious identity. Instead of supporting the Palestinian cause merely because the victims are co-religionists, solidarity must be grounded in a deeper, more critical and humane response to human suffering.

True commitment to justice means standing with all oppressed people, regardless of faith—not just those who resemble us. Communalizing the struggle not only weakens its moral foundation but also isolates it from broader global movements for justice.

The Palestinian cause—and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict—deserves to be part of a larger, more inclusive struggle for dignity, freedom, and shared humanity, rising above narrow religious or cultural divisions toward a just future for both peoples.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.