Turkish President is a ‘hard nut’ 

The symbolism was not missed by observers. On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was shaking hands with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even as US President Donald Trump was having a “very friendly conversation” with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and inviting the latter to visit the White House.

Duterte, who The New York Times says is overseeing a campaign of mass murder, is like Erdogan. Both are hailed by their supporters as new, muscular leaders who would stop at nothing to achieve their ends. They both have given their security forces blanket powers to shoot and detain people and, as Duterte said in relation to alleged drug dealers, ‘slaughter them all’.

President Erdogan’s two-day visit to India saw him pledging his support to India on its war on terrorism. The two grim-faced leaders—Modi and Erdogan—declared their determination to jointly take on terror of all kinds.

The Turkish President also received an honorary doctorate degree from Jamia Millia Islamia University, which is the only institution in India to offer courses in Turkish language. A futile bid was made to stop the function by ex-students of Jamia and on change.org, a petition was initiated by one of them, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who said, "Erdogan, who has won a fraudulent plebiscite in order to crown himself an unchallenged dictator of Turkey, is a toxic influence in Turkish public life, in west Asia and in the world. He has stifled dissent, cracked down on the rights of working people, women and minorities in Turkey and is conducting a brutal war on the people of Kurdistan."

There is little doubt that Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are not shy of using strong-arm methods to stifle dissent. A few landmarks provide sufficient insight into the kind of regime he heads back in Turkey:

• Erdogan requested Germany to spy on his opponents (Germany has a large Turkish immigrant population which was also eligible to take part in the Referendum), a request that Germany turned down in March this year.
• Following Dutch refusal to haul up Turkish dissenters, Erdogan ensured that the Dutch Ambassador was made unwelcome in Ankara.
• After a failed coup last year, he dismissed 35,000 employees from the military, security forces and the judiciary including a hundred Generals and Admirals.
• He also sacked 15,000 employees in the Ministry of Education, and 21,000 teachers who were not members of his party were dubbed as terrorists.
• He forced as many as 1,500 deans (professors) to resign from universities on suspicion that they were opposed to him.
• He asked The New York Times to behave after the newspaper reported on his links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State (Turkey was accused of providing arms to IS).
• Erdogan defied orders from courts to get a 1,000-room palace built in Ankara on donated land. Originally meant as the Prime Minister’s residence, he converted it to the Presidential Palace once he became the President.
• The palace is equipped to foil chemical attacks and has bunkers, tunnels and measures to ensure that the rooms are not bugged.
• The palace is spread over 74 acres (Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi occupies five acres though the President’s estate covers over 300 acres).