In Maldivian dilemma, India needs to tread cautiously

The caveat of the Maldives Defence Minister Adam Shareef Umar that any talk of Indian military intervention would adversely impact bilateral relations, following the stalemate that arose out of the Supreme Court of Maldives having directed on February 1, 2018, the release of nine political prisoners including former President Mohamed Nasheed, is correct. India must desist itself from raring to go into the politics of vendetta currently being played out in both Bangladesh and Maldives. It must not be seen as a hegemon, and the human right ‘violations’ in  Maldives is nowhere comparable to, say, the state of things in Sudan or Myanmar. It is worthwhile to recall that despite the rapacious violations of human rights in East Pakistan in 1971, the UN Security Council did not approve military action.

Being called a hegemon is both a cuss-word and a compliment. The growing fear that a bigger nation would eventually subsume smaller nations is as much real as the anxiety of a bigger power to secure or to retain its strategic area of influence. Maldives is a fine case study of two equally ambitious powers vying with one another in a bid to further clout. China’s capacity to mobilise huge resources at its disposal by dint of which it can afford to further its expansionist ambitions, and thus to wean away many of India’s past friends is a time-worn formula of success, to which India looks increasingly vulnerable.  The common pattern to play a China card to fend off India had gained traction earlier with Sri Lanka, next Nepal and now, Maldives.

Abdullah Yameen, the man who deposed the country’s first democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed in a coup of sorts in 2012, and has been in charge since 2013 lost no time in cosying up to China and deepening relationship with Saudi Arabia. Besides Maldives, India has been facing such relationship vacillations in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well. Sri Lanka came to see China as a solution to all its problems under former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, while Maithripala Sirisena on the saddle looks a bit more realistically poised. India’s relationship with Nepal came almost to a trough, though since last year things are beginning to look up. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government deserves praise for the good work she is doing for her country all of which add up to India’s favour. Respectful of the shared history of the sub-continent and bound to a tie of everlasting friendship with our country, she is surely the most pro-India Bangladeshi leader India can ever have. But the main Opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), under former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, is staunchly anti-Indian and the Indo-Bangla bilateral relationship during her time had never been easy. With Khaleda Zia’s incarceration and the politics of vendetta unfolding in Bangladesh, the position of India vis-à-vis Bangladesh becomes unenviable more because it has now to see the most friendly government to it engaging in undemocratic excesses in seeking to muzzle an opposition historically hostile to it, acts which India can neither lustily cheer nor diplomatically own up. And almost reverse to this situation, India now has to swallow an anti-India (and pro-China) militia in Maldives clamping down on democratic institutions. Both being ‘internal’ matters, but with enormous stakes attached to them, India is left with little hard choices other than mere wishful thinking for events to take turns favourable to it. Ideally, it should plead for the restoration of democracy for both the nations.

Maldives is condemned to the attention of the major world powers on account of its crucial geo-strategic location in the Indian Ocean as it sits astride on major sea lanes of communications (SLOCs). Despite it being within Indian arc of military influence, a ‘favourable’ dispensation cannot be enforced on it. Therefore, a military intervention is strictly out of place for it not to be seen as an attempt to regime change, as a lot of other Southeast Asian nations are wary of India looking as a hegemon. The situation is way different from when India mounted Operation Cactus on 1988 at the behest of the then President of Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an intervention endorsed by the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain and its neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh among others. An exception can always be made to external aggression but this time around for the ‘internal’ nature of the unfolding crisis, albeit with ‘external’ powers feared to be at play meddling in its domestic politics, India’s best call would be to engage the UN and tick the world leaders on the developments. It must learn to use its diplomatic resources to the best of its ability.  And it surely knows where it has to pick its fight.

The author is a teacher and commentator on geopolitical affairs