Introduction

On May 28, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the run-off elections, extending his rule for another five years. Erdogan has been president since 2003. Over the past twenty years, he’s used religion to come to power, and maintain it, in a country where popular politics previously had a largely secular flavour. Erdogan, and his Development Party (AKP), used religious nationalism to create the new Islamic Turkey. In this episode, The Hindu speaks to Sathish Deshpande, to understand, how much of this is a result of Erdogan and his policies, and identify the similarities between Turkey’s trajectory and what we are seeing in India.