A coup or even an attempted coup in Turkey is unlikely to evoke too much interest in India, preoccupied as we are with domestic happenings. Yet, waking up on a slightly overcast morning in london and turning on the radio, I could not but detect an undercurrent of disappointment that the controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had successfully negotiated a formidable challenge to his rule and was still in charge.
It is still unclear as to whether the mid-ranking military officers who masterminded the attempt to forcibly overthrow an elected Government were hardened secularists who hated Erdogan’s soft Islamism or were followers of an exiled Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic preacher who seeks to take the Islamist agenda many more steps forward. Whatever the reality, there is little or no doubt — at least if the excitement on Friday night when the first news of the attempted coup broke in the social media — that the coup enjoyed the emotional support of a very wide of the European liberal establishment that has come to be exasperated with the decisiveness of Erdogan.
For a large section that views Turkey as a key player that holds the ultimate key to future events in West Asia, Erdogan is the main stumbling block to the unwavering return of Ankara to the Western bloc. Yet, while the Turkish President may well be accused of playing footsie with the Islamists and even colluding in the creation of a refugee problem in Europe — an issue that has threatened the efficacy of the European Union — it is also recognised that Erdogan’s political party enjoys a spectacular measure of support in the countryside and among the poorer section of Turkey’s urban population.
If the coup failed to take off on Friday night, it was not due to the amateurishness of the plotters. Even a measure of ham-handedness has not been a deterrent to successful regime changes if the Government of the day happens to be fragile. Earlier experiences of countries such as Syria, Egypt, Iraq and even Turkey suggest that it takes very little for a clutch of Colonels (or even Generals) to fire a few shells, intimidate the local population and effortlessly assume control over the state by force. That the control of the bridges over the Bosphorus proved insufficient to oust Erdogan and send him packing to exile in Germany — which is what the plotters and their many Western supporters had calculated — was due to the dogged resistance put up by ordinary people. The Turkish coup was foiled by a spectacular show of people’s power. At the end of the day, the ordinary soldiers who had taken to the streets to effect a regime change could not fire indiscriminately at their own kith and kin.
The shock waves from the coup are likely to be felt in the European capitals and even in Washington. In its post-coup commentaries, the BBC, for example, mouthed the hope that Erdogan would have been jolted into recognising that his “illiberal” democracy would now have to be abandoned. To me, that seems a distant hope: a blatantly undemocratic misadventure cannot be the occasion for the restoration of liberal democracy. I don’t know what lessons Erdogan will draw from the events of Friday night. A common sense view would suggest that he is likely to come down hard on the extreme secularists who still exercise influence over the military, even if these elements may not have played any significant role in the July plot. The more the West is seen to be cosying up to Turkey’s secular liberals, the more intense is likely to be the ensuing backlash.
My own hunch is that in the coming years Turkey is likely to behave even more awkwardly with the West.
On the face of it, the events in Turkey are only of academic interest to India. Yet, if we probe the subject deeply, we are likely to find some disconcerting parallels. The most important, to my mind, is the growing aggressiveness of the media in promoting what it sees as the liberal route to salvation for all countries that seeks to break with the liberal consensus. What we are witnessing is a new form of ideological imperialism, promoted aggressively by the media (maybe with some deniable help from its intelligence agencies) in alliance with disaffected intellectuals in the concerned countries, to either oust or cut down to size strong leaders with nationalist orientations. If Erdogan has systematically diluted the Attaturk consensus that has prevailed in Turkey since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it is not least because he has popular support for his deviation. But popular support seems to be a matter of least consequence for those Western institutions that are driven by a strong ideological agenda. We witnessed it in the arrogant reaction to the popular uprising in the UK against membership of the EU. And we are witnessing it again in the attempts to pillory and destabilise Erdogan.
The Cold War was won by the West because the apparatchiks that governed the Soviet bloc were contemptuous of the popular will. Now it seems it is the turn of Western liberalism to thrust a model of change that doesn’t take into account what the people want. Are there emerging parallels in India we can detectIJ