The Buddhist Outlier: Why Mongolia Is Not Just Another Central Asian State

The Buddhist Outlier: Why Mongolia Is Not Just Another Central Asian State

How demography and faith set Ulaanbaatar apart from the Turkic-Muslim steppe — and why that difference is drawing it closer to New Delhi

By Ali O. DIRIOZ, PhD

17 July 2026

Mongolia is routinely filed, in Western and even regional commentary, under the loose heading of “Central Asia“ — lumped in with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan as one more post-Soviet, steppe-adjacent state wedged between Russia and China. The geography invites the shorthand. The demography and the religion do not. Where the five “-stans“ are overwhelmingly Turkic-speaking and Sunni Muslim — members, in spirit if not always in formal alignment, of the Turkic civilizational and linguistic world that links them to Ankara — Mongolia is Mongolic-speaking, ethnically Khalkha Mongol, and, uniquely in the region, roughly half Buddhist. That single demographic fact reroutes its civilizational orientation, and increasingly its strategic partnerships, away from the Turkic-Islamic axis and toward the Buddhist arc that runs through Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia — and India.

The numbers are worth stating plainly. Mongolia's population, at roughly 3.4 million, is one of the smallest and most sparsely distributed in the world — about two people per square kilometer across a territory the size of Western Europe. Ethnic Mongols make up close to 95 percent of the population; the largest minority, ethnic Kazakhs, is concentrated in the western Bayan-Ölgii province and is itself Muslim, a small but telling exception that shows the Turkic-Islamic world does touch Mongolia — at its edges, not its center. On religion, the country's own Washington embassy puts the picture at roughly half Buddhist, with the rest divided between religious “none“ (a Soviet-era secularization hangover), a small Muslim Kazakh minority, and Shamanist, Christian and other affiliations. No other state between the Caspian and the Pacific carries that religious profile.

This is not a recent invention. Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelug school took root among the Mongol khanates from the sixteenth century onward, following an earlier, thinner wave of Buddhist contact that traces back — as Indian officials are fond of pointing out — to monks and texts that moved north from the Gangetic plain and Nalanda through Tibet and into the Mongolian steppe over a thousand years ago. Genghis Khan's empire was, notoriously, religiously plural, but his successors and the Mongol aristocracy gravitated toward Buddhism as a source of legitimacy and statecraft, producing a distinctly Mongolian Buddhist high culture centered on monasteries such as Gandantegchenling in Ulaanbaatar. Seven decades of Communist rule after 1921 tried to erase this — monasteries were destroyed, monks purged — but the post-1990 democratic transition saw a rapid, visible revival of Buddhist practice that is now central to how Mongolia narrates its own identity, both domestically and abroad.

It is precisely this Buddhist thread that India has picked up and, over the past year, pulled hard on. In late May and early June 2026, sacred relics of Arhat Sariputra and Arhat Mahamoggallana — the two chief disciples of the Buddha, preserved for centuries in the stupas of Sanchi — were flown from India to Ulaanbaatar aboard an Indian Air Force IL-76 and ceremonially enshrined at Gandantegchenling Monastery for a ten-day public exposition timed to Buddha Purnima. It was only the second time in history these relics had left Indian soil, the first being a 2024 exposition in Thailand. India's Ministry of Culture, the National Museum in New Delhi, the Government of Madhya Pradesh, the International Buddhist Confederation, and the Mahabodhi Society of Sri Lanka jointly organized the event, and Indian officials on the ground described the two countries not merely as strategic partners but as “spiritual siblings.“ Thousands of devotees turned out. This was choreography, but choreography that only works because the underlying sentiment is real.

The relic exposition did not happen in isolation. It was explicitly announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh's state visit to New Delhi in October 2025 — a visit that marked seventy years of India-Mongolia diplomatic relations (India was among the first non-Communist states to recognize Mongolia's independence, in 1955) and ten years since the two countries upgraded ties to a formal Strategic Partnership during Modi's own 2015 visit to Ulaanbaatar. During that October visit, Modi called the relationship “spiritual neighbours,“ the two sides agreed to digitize a million Buddhist manuscripts held at Gandantegchenling, and India committed to free e-visas for Mongolian citizens along with a program sponsoring young Mongolian “cultural ambassadors“ to visit India annually. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar followed up with his own visit to Ulaanbaatar in June 2026, touring the monastery and calling it “a symbol of the special and spiritual bond between India and Mongolia,“ while reaffirming that “the greatest friendship is spiritual friendship.“

None of this is sentimentality detached from interest — it is, rather, interest expressed through the idiom that both governments have found most durable. Mongolia's foreign policy has long rested on a doctrine of the “Third Neighbor“: since it borders only Russia and China, and has no wish to be pulled entirely into either orbit, Ulaanbaatar actively cultivates democratic, distant partners — the United States, Japan, South Korea, the European Union, and increasingly India — to balance its two overbearing neighbors. India, for its part, is looking for reliable partners in its “extended neighbourhood“ and Central-East Asia more broadly: critical minerals and coking coal for its steel industry, a genuine foothold via its Act East policy, and diplomatic company among fellow democracies and Global South states that do not carry the baggage of great-power dependency. The material anchor of the relationship is the $1.7 billion Indian line of credit funding Mongolia's first oil refinery, at Sainshand/Altanshiree in Dornogovi province — India's largest soft-credit development project anywhere in the world — alongside newer cooperation on defense training, cybersecurity, and IT education through the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Centre of Excellence.
Here the comparison with the rest of Central Asia becomes analytically useful rather than merely descriptive. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan ( Tajikistan's culture is closer to Persian, not Turkic) are pulled, to varying degrees, into a Turkic linguistic and cultural community that gives Ankara real soft-power reach through the Organization of Turkic States, shared Islamic institutions, and a common script-and-language reform agenda; they are also more deeply wired into Russian security structures (the CSTO, in some cases) and Chinese Belt and Road infrastructure than Mongolia is. Mongolia sits outside both of those pull structures. It has no Turkic-Islamic hinterland to lean on and no equivalent of the CSTO. Its distinctive civilizational lever is Buddhism — which happens to connect it not to its immediate neighbors but to a further and, geopolitically, more useful set of partners: India, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia's Buddhist-majority states. In a region where nearly every country's foreign policy identity runs through Ankara, Moscow, Beijing or the Gulf, Mongolia's runs, distinctively, through Bodh Gaya and Sanchi.

This should not be overstated. The Diplomat's own assessment of the Khurelsukh visit was candid that the “strategic partnership“ label remains, for now, more aspirational than delivered: trade volumes between the two countries are still marginal next to Mongolia's overwhelming economic dependence on China (which buys the bulk of its coal and copper) and Russia (which supplies its fuel), and Mongolia's landlocked geography imposes real logistical chokepoints that no amount of shared civilizational sentiment can dissolve by itself. The refinery's completion timeline, and whether India can translate cultural goodwill into a genuine critical-minerals supply chain, will be the real tests of whether “spiritual siblings“ becomes economic partners at scale.

Even so, the demographic and religious starting point matters for how this relationship should be read. Mongolia is not a Central Asian state that happens to have a Buddhist minority; it is a Buddhist-majority state that happens to sit in Central Asia's geographic shadow. That distinction is doing real diplomatic work in 2025–26 — shaping which capitals Ulaanbaatar calls a “third neighbor,“ which civilizational language its leaders reach for at joint press conferences, and which country was chosen to fly Buddhist relics of head-of-state protocol status halfway across Asia. For India, a country perennially searching for instruments of soft power that are neither military nor purely transactional, Mongolia's demographic peculiarity has become a genuine strategic asset — proof that shared faith, however old, can still do diplomatic work that shared borders or shared markets cannot.

This difference deserves to be understood and respected rather than smoothed over by the regional shorthand, and the Organization of Turkic States itself has already shown, in another context, how that can be done. The OTS is not a closed club: since 2018 it has hosted Hungary as an observer member — a Christian-majority, non-Turkic-speaking EU state admitted on the strength of a claimed Hunnic-Turkic ancestral link and a deliberate “Eastern Opening“ foreign policy, now deepening security and economic cooperation with the bloc well beyond a ceremonial role. That precedent is worth extending deliberately. Just as Hungary sits inside the OTS orbit as a non-Turkic, Christian-majority partner rather than a member proper, Mongolia — by faith, language and history the most distinct state in its neighborhood — could be offered a comparable second-circle relationship: not membership, which its Mongolic language and Buddhist identity make a poor fit, but structured cooperation as a respected, differentiated neighbor. The same logic could reasonably extend to Bulgaria and Finland, both of which carry their own historical Turkic or Uralic threads (Bulgar and Finno-Ugric respectively) without belonging to the contemporary Turkic-Muslim core; to Georgia, a Christian Caucasian state already deeply enmeshed in Turkic-world transport corridors and trade; to Tajikistan, Persian-speaking rather than Turkic but geographically and economically inseparable from its Turkic neighbors in Central Asia; and, should peace with Azerbaijan ever be consolidated, to Armenia, whose inclusion in any such second circle would itself be a meaningful signal of regional reconciliation rather than an assertion of shared ancestry. None of these states are Turkic in the way OTS's core membership is, and none should be asked to pretend otherwise. The point of a second circle is precisely that it does not require the fiction of shared origin — only the acknowledgment of shared geography, shared interest, and, in Mongolia's case, an old and unusually well-documented civilizational bond that happens to run through India rather than Ankara. Recognizing that difference explicitly, rather than folding Mongolia into a “Central Asian“ category it does not fit, would let the OTS model the kind of confident, non-exclusive regionalism it says it wants to build.

References
Embassy of Mongolia in the United States, “Demographics.“ https://mongolianembassy.us/about-mongolia/demographics/
India Blooms News Service, “India-Mongolia Spiritual Cultural Bond: Sacred Buddha Relics Draw Thousands of Devotees in Ulaanbaatar,“ June 1, 2026. https://www.indiablooms.com/news/india-mongolia-spiritual-cultural-bond-sacred-buddha-relics-draw-thousands-of-devotees-in-ulaanbaatar/details
Ministry of Culture, Government of India, “Sacred Relics of Lord Buddha's Chief Disciples Enshrined in Mongolia, Step towards Deepening Spiritual & Civilisational Bonds between India & Mongolia,“ May 31, 2026. https://culture.gov.in/events/sacred-relics-lord-buddhas-chief-disciples-enshrined-mongolia-step-towards-deepening
The Diplomat, “Mongolian President Khurelsukh's India Visit Will Redefine the Strategic Partnership,“ October 2025. https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/mongolian-president-khurelsukhs-india-visit-will-redefine-the-strategic-partnership/
DD News, “India and Mongolia Are Strategic Partners, Spiritual Siblings: EAM Jaishankar,“ June 2026. https://ddnews.gov.in/en/india-and-mongolia-are-strategic-partners-spiritual-siblings-eam-jaishankar/