Happy But Watching: Why India must observe the Maldives with care
Another authoritarian ruler enamoured of a Chinese debt trap has been felled by voters in India's backyard. Nearly four years since Sri Lankan voters ousted Mahinda Rajapaksa as the country's President, people in the Maldives, in the presidential election held on September 23, gave President Abdulla Yameen the boot in a surprising electoral outcome.
President Yameen was considered a shoo-in to win another five-year term. He was overseeing a systematic democratic backsliding in his first term that began in 2013 and he had expected to contest the election virtually unopposed — with all of his potential opponents either in jail or forced into exile on charges ranging from corruption to terrorism. Virtually no one expected him to make a concession speech on September 24.
In the months leading up to the polls, Yameen had cracked down on political dissent, civil liberties, media freedom and the judiciary. In February, in a politically expedient move that invited worldwide condemnation, he imposed Emergency (the second time he was doing so) to annul a February 1 Supreme Court order that called for the immediate release and new trials of nine opposition leaders — including the exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed — freeing them to contest the presidential poll. The court order had also nullified a ruling in which 12 lawmakers lost their Parliamentary seats for defecting last July from Yameen's ruling Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), costing the party majority in the country's Parliament, thus making the President vulnerable to impeachment.
He then got two Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice, removed and jailed, and forced the court to reverse the judgement. Just a day before the poll, the police raided Nasheed's pro-India Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) office in the capital, Male, without a search warrant.
Yet, the joint opposition presidential candidate Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, an MDP man, defeated President Yameen.
Democracy has been on the retreat in the Maldives for years but now, its allies, including India, should hope that the 2018 presidential vote would "bring the country back to the democratic path" again, as Nasheed put it. However, optimism must be tempered with caution, given the potential for political instability.
It was 10 years ago that the Maldives made a transition from autocracy to democracy, when Nasheed ended the three decade-old autocratic rule of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom in the country's first multiparty presidential poll. However, the Maldives democracy model has been floundering, especially after February 2012 when the police and army forced Nasheed out of office in what he called a putsch against him by entrenched state interests represented by the PPM and the Gayoom family. However, critics of Nasheed say he was hardly a fall guy — he himself triggered the crisis by nakedly interfering in the judiciary by ordering the illegal detention of a criminal court judge he did not like.
Nasheed was replaced in February 2012 by friend-turned-foe Vice-President Mohammad Waheed.
In the 2013 election, the PPM nominated Yameen who ran against Nasheed and won the presidential race in coalition with the Jumhooree Party and religious hardline Islamist Adalat Party, both of which backed Nasheed against Gayoom in 2008. Both the Jumhooree Party and Islamist Adalat Party supported Solih in the 2018 election. In an interesting twist, Yameen had turned against Gayoom, his half-brother and former ally, and imprisoned him this June.
India has watched the retreat of democracy in the Maldives with increasing alarm, even as the Yameen government sought to steer the country away from its traditionally strong relations with India and move closer to China.
Though Solih has won the vote, the fickle alliance that supports him might bring political instability as the common enemy, Yameen, is now defeated. Maldivian politics is often about skullduggery — there is no surety that Solih and MDP themselves not become authoritarian in a culture that breeds such tendencies.
Moreover, it will be a folly to discount the power vested interests — in the armed forces, politics and business that profited from corruption that moved into high gear after China started pouring money into infrastructure projects — hold in the country.
Even though a pro-India man will become now the President, New Delhi cannot wish away the influence China has assiduously built up in the seven years it has opened its embassy in Male, in terms of development investment, free trade agreement and lease of islands to companies, which have raised concerns about China pursuing land grabs and debt trap diplomacy in the Maldives. The days when India assumed that the Maldives is safely within its orbit are over long ago.
Nevertheless, India's interests are best served when the Maldives is a democracy, unlike China's, which prefers autocrats to push the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A democratic Maldives is win-win for both nations most concerned.
In recent years, the incumbent government in the Maldives had radically followed policies to give China unprecedented prominence in a bid to defeat the conventional 'India first policy' and make otherwise friendly India-Maldives bilateral ties overtly strained. With the Bay of Bengal for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), India hopes to get China to pull back in the Indian Ocean. India's unprecedented recent investment in its Naval force is proof of this desire. Geopolitics was the raison d'être for the birth of BIMSTEC. This is because the Indian Ocean has become the strategic pivot where rivalry between China and India are paramount.
India's 'Look East' is, therefore, primarily a counter to China's 'string of pearls' strategy that made the Maldives one of the major destinations of Chinese investment. Clearly, the aim has been for China to counter India's clout in the South Asian region through making favourable ports in the region and supplementing that through the hegemonic BRI.
Next to Pakistan and Nepal, the Maldives was made site of a plot where China expected to encircle India in a quagmire. For now, it's foiled as the Maldives has reclaimed over the democracy and rule of law.
In times to come, this democracy will be the prime target of China to triumph over. As the world's largest democracy, India has to uphold democratic spirits across nations and wage a mind-game with China. For this, India is in need of an empowered Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). In addition, an army of diplomats, strategic thinkers and writers are needed to reciprocate China's incessant advances for reshaping South Asia. With the Maldives election, India can heave a sigh of relief. But with unpredictable time ahead, it needs to attain the capabilities which could match Chinese might.
Most importantly, it should continue believing in democracy and its values. These are priceless, if practiced purely.
(Rajiv Jayaram is a journalist and political commentator; Atul K Thakur is a New Delhi-based columnist, with keen interest in South Asian affairs.)