The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is faced with a potential new foe, India, a close ally of Israel, that is loudly signaling it may join swelling axis of anti-Turkey nations led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Greece.

The acrimony is being channeled through a spate of nasty articles in the Indian media casting Turkey as a malign meddler that is seeking to recruit and radicalize India’s estimated 182 million Muslims in cahoots with Pakistan.

The most striking of these appeared in the Aug. 7 edition of the Hindustan Times, India’s highest-circulation English-language newspaper. Shishir Gupta, a prominent Times columnist with close ties to the establishment, cited an Indian intelligence report that claimed Turkey had emerged “as the hub of anti-India activities” second only to Pakistan. He said Turkish individuals and groups, “some directly linked to Erdogan and his family,” had accelerated the awarding of “lucrative scholarships” to Indian Muslims to study in Turkey and that once they arrived they were “taken over by the Pakistani proxies” operating there. The motives Gupta ascribes to Ankara are familiar: Building on Turkey's Ottoman imperial past, Erdogan wants to become a latter-day caliph, the protector of Sunni Muslims worldwide and to challenge Saudi Arabia’s dominance over them.

The subcontinent may seem like fertile ground. The violent repression of Muslims under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government boosts Erdogan's appeal as a rare leader who speaks up for Muslims and pushes back against the West.