Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is expanding his outreach to Muslims in India to boost his bid for leadership of the Muslim world, analyst Abhinav Pandya said in Hareetz on Thursday.

Pandya said that most Indian analysts are being short-sighted when ruling out Erdoğan’s larger political ambitions and seeing his initiatives in India merely as efforts to undermine the Gulen movement.

Turkish government accuses the Gülen movement of orchestrating a failed coup attempt in 2016 and has launched a crackdown against the religious group’s devotees in Turkey and abroad.

But Erdoğan has other reasons to invest in Indian Muslims, Pandya said, because the country has the world’s third largest Muslim population and Erdoğan has been seeking ways to increase his influence among Muslims globally.

A Turkish think tank named the South Asia Strategic Research Center (GASAM) established by Ali Sahin, a Turkish Islamist who studied in Pakistan and who now serves as deputy minister for European Affairs in Erdoğan’s cabinet, plays a pivotal role in the Turkish president’s efforts in southern Asia, according to Pandya.

"GASAM organises conferences to which it invites Muslim clerics, politicians and community leaders from South Asia, to export the AKP’s Islamist ideology to Indian Muslims,” Pandya said, adding that Indian Islamic cleric Sheikh Salman Nadwi’s son, currently studying in Turkey, is a regular panelist in the conferences organised by the think tank.

A number of “controversial” Turkish Islamist clerics are also regularly visiting India, Pandya said. One of them, Sardar Demirel, who was educated in Pakistan, visited Kolkata in 2016 to participate in a protest march against a reform measure to bring Muslim divorce laws in line with India's secular laws, he said.

Turkey has also extended a warm welcome to several extremist Indian Muslim preachers, according to the analyst. One of them, Zakir Naik, known as "the world's leading Salafi evangelist”, delivered a speech in 2017 for an organisation run by Erdoğan’s son, Pandya said. In his speech, Naik declared that Erdoğan was the only Muslim ruler who had the guts to support Islam openly, he added.

Turkey also funds NGOs for outreach among Indian Muslims, Muslim student exchange programs, and influence within madrasas and mosques, Pandya said.