Soft Power or Soft Pressure? How Turkey is Weaponizing Narratives Against India
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.
