New Delhi: Even as India has started the process of replacing its military personnel posted in the Maldives with civilian personnel following a deal arrived at between the two sides, Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu has now asserted that “Indian troops” would not be allowed to stay in his country even in civilian clothing.
“There will be no Indian troops in the country come May 10,” the Edition.mv news website quoted Muizzu as saying while addressing a residential community at Baa atoll Eydhafushi on Monday. “Not in uniform and not in civilian clothing. Indian military will not be residing in this country in any form of clothing. I state this with confidence.”
Pro-China Muizzu had won last year’s presidential election on a pronounced anti-India plank. He ran an ‘India Out’ campaign in which he called for the withdrawal of some Indian military personnel present in his country for operating two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft. These personnel, numbering less than 100, are primarily involved in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief work in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation.
However, Muizzu, during his election campaign, claimed that over 1,000 Indian military personnel were posted in the Maldives and they posed a threat to the sovereignty of the country. After assuming office in November last year, Muizzu made a formal request to India to withdraw these personnel.
Following two meetings of a high-level group set up for the purpose, it was decided that these military personnel posted across three platforms will be replaced by civilian Indian personnel, the first batch by March 10 and the last of the batches by May 10. The first batch of Indian civilians reached the Maldives in the last week of February.
However, now with Muizzu making this fresh claim that “Indian troops” will not be allowed to stay in his country even in civilian clothing, the already strained relationship between New Delhi and Male is set to get further complicated.
According to the Edition.mv report, the Opposition in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation has been criticising the Muizzu administration saying that the Indian personnel sent to the Maldives as civilians are in reality military officials out of uniform and that the government has no way to ascertain otherwise.
“That these people (Indian military) are not departing, that they are returning after changing their uniforms into civilian clothing,” Muizzu said during his speech at Eydhafushi. “We must not indulge in such thoughts that instill doubts in our hearts and spread lies.”
India-Maldives ties are at an all-time low after Muizzu adopted a series of anti-India foreign policy steps. Apart from demanding the withdrawal of the Indian military personnel, the Maldives decided not to renew a hydrography agreement with India citing national security concerns and the safeguarding of sensitive information. The hydrographic survey agreement was signed in 2019 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the Maldives. Under the agreement, India was allowed to conduct a comprehensive study of the island nation’s territorial waters, which includes reefs, lagoons, coastlines, ocean currents and tide levels.
The Maldives also decided to allow a Chinese vessel to enter its territorial waters ostensibly to do research work. This decision came despite pressure from the Indian government and concerns raised by various quarters about the vessel being a “spy vessel”. India has strongly been protesting the repeated visits by Chinese vessels to the waters of the south Indian Ocean, a region New Delhi considers to be under its sphere of influence.
At the beginning of January this year, a political row broke out between India and the Maldives after Modi visited the union territory of Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea and promoted it on social media as an exciting tourism destination. Though Modi did not mention any other country in his comments, some Maldivian politicians took it as the Lakshadweep being showcased as a rival to the tourism industry in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation. They made disparaging remarks against the Prime Minister and racist comments against Indians in general.
This sparked a social media backlash from Indians, including entertainment world celebrities and sports stars. Many opposition leaders and tourism industry bodies in the Maldives also criticised the Muizzu government for this. Following this, three junior ministers in the Maldives government were suspended.
Following this, Muizzu went on a nearly week-long visit to China. This is a break from the practice followed by his three immediate democratically elected predecessors - Ibrahim Solih, Abdulla Yameen and Mohamed Nasheed - who had made India the destination of their first state visit after assuming office. In fact, after assuming office in November last year, Muizzu made Turkey the destination of his first state visit.
Muizzu further upped the ante against New Delhi by targeting the health sector. Till now, hospitals empanelled under Aasandha, the Maldives’ universal health insurance scheme, for overseas treatment of Maldivian patients were restricted to just India and Sri Lanka, the majority of them in India. The largest amount of money disbursed by Aasandha to foreign hospitals went to Indian hospitals. Over Rs 7.5 billion has been disbursed to hospitals in India during the past 10 years and two months.
Now, following directives issued by Muizzu, the state-owned Aasandha Company, which acts as a third-party claims administrator, has started work to expand the scope of overseas treatment for Maldivians beyond India and Sri Lanka. The company is now in talks with Thailand and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Both countries are leading medical care providers but at a relatively higher cost.
As part of New Delhi’s Neighbourhood First Policy, the Maldives is strategically significant to India because of its location in the Indian Ocean. India and the Maldives share ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious and commercial links steeped in antiquity and enjoy close, cordial and multi-dimensional relations. However, regime instability in the Maldives since 2008 has posed significant challenges to the India-Maldives relationship, particularly in the political and strategic spheres.
Although India continues to be an important partner of the Maldives, New Delhi cannot afford to be complacent over its position and must remain attentive to the developments in the Maldives. India must play a key role within the Indo-Pacific security space to ensure regional security in South Asia and surrounding maritime boundaries. China’s strategic footprint in India’s neighbourhood has increased. The Maldives has emerged as an important ‘pearl’ in China’s ‘String of Pearls’ construct in South Asia.
Meanwhile, even as Muizzu asserted that “Indian troops” would not be allowed to stay in his country even in civilian clothing, in a related development, the Maldives signed a defence cooperation agreement with China on Tuesday. As part of the deal, China will offer free defence assistance to the Maldives. The agreement was signed by Maldives Defence Minister Mohamed Ghassan Maumoon and Major General Zhang Baoqun, Deputy Director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China.
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