How Turkey plans to ride on more flights for biz with India

NEW DELHI: Talking to Burak Akçapar, the Turkish Ambassador to India, it is easy to forget he represents a country in turmoil. A month ago, there was a coup attempt

NEW DELHI: Talking to Burak Akçapar, the Turkish Ambassador to India, it is easy to forget he represents a country in turmoil. A month ago, there was a coup attempt by a military faction there. It was foiled by protesters, police, and loyalists who took on tanks, helicopters, and soldiers in the streets of Ankara and Istanbul.

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The country was not left unscathed. Hundreds died. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared emergency for three months as he goes after the alleged network of Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in the United States and has been accused of masterminding the coup attempt. The Turkish Lira hit an all-time low against the US dollar. Global rating agency Standard & Poor’s changed the country’s outlook to negative. Travel and tourism revenues have been in decline. The country’s current account deficit — the difference between cost of imports and exports — is a high 4.5%. Annual GDP growth has slowed to 3.5%.

But Akçapar, dapper and determined in his dark suit and spectacles, talks about rebound, recovery, and resilience, and how India and its economy can benefit from Turkey. “The silver lining is that the Turkish nation has proven its very strong commitment to democracy.”

President Erdogan was once jailed for reciting a religious poem in public. He came to power in 2003 as the voice of Turkey’s religious masses. The New York Times says he always had ambitions of surpassing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as the country’s most consequential figure. The failed coup may allow him finally to do that. Isn’t he behaving like a dictator? “I have been hearing such things,” says Akçapar. “[The Turkish people] defeated the coup upon the call of their popular president, who won by 52% of the votes. Now his popularity rating is 70%. Business cannot be as usual when extraordinary measures have to be taken. The emergency mechanism ensures that the exceptional measures are still within the boundaries of rule of law and due process.”

The Turkish economy, despite its slowing down, is one of the fastest growing in the higher-income group. Turkey is a G20 country, in the higher-medium income bracket, and the coup, its leaders say, changes nothing.

“The fallout is likely to be short-lived,” deputy prime minister Mehmet Simsek told a group of reporters last month after the coup attempt. “I would argue that economic fundamentals are good enough, strong enough to survive without long-term impact.”

Akçapar elaborates. “The Turkish economy is showing remarkable resilience, showing we have solid macroeconomic fundamentals. Our financial sector is almost zero-toxic, very tightly-regulated. The fundamentals are in place.” What’s more, Turkey is a big manufacturing and construction hub, areas that have longer-term investments than the financial sector.

“Turkey is already a major manufacturing nation. We have reached close to $12,000 per capita income, with zero oil, and a little bit of tourism. Our construction sector, in terms of the number of projects completed and their value, is second only to China’s. They promise a lot for the infrastructure group being led by the Indian government,” says Akçapar.

The key to better economic cooperation with India, he says, lies in connectivity, and therefore in aviation. The two countries are not connected by land or sea, only air.

Turkey wants to double the flights from Delhi and Mumbai, and add six more destinations in India, some of which are Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Kolkata, and Bangalore. “Turkish Airlines operates the world’s largest destination network from Istanbul,” says Akçapar. The breadth of its network can be used to get businessmen and tourists from a large number of cities in Europe and elsewhere to India.

Meantime, Akçapar is watching with interest the work to increase India’s business links with Iran. “Iran’s shortest connection to Europe is through Turkey, and it is a very well-developed connection. Not a single nail is needed to sue that connectivity.”

Indeed, Akçapar is most triumphant when saying that the Istanbul airport reopened on the same day as the coup attempt.