collection 2020
A Friend with Many Motives?
Why India is Providing Covid-19 Aid to the Maldives
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By Aarti Bhanushali and Xiaoming Dou
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Indian Prime Minister Modi meeting the President of Maldives Solih in Male in 2018, the relationship between the two nations has been strong historically; Source: Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), Wikimedia Commons
Paradise in lockdown - straight out of a Robin Crusoe tale
The Maldives conjure up magnificence with images of pristine beaches, reef-ringed atolls, and luxurious bungalows floating on the water. Now the resorts are empty, loungers unoccupied, and beaches wearing a secluded frown - straight out of a Robinson Crusoe tale.
As the Maldives continues turning remote luxury resort hotels of the idyllic archipelago into quarantine facilities in a bid to insulate the remote Indian Ocean nation from the spreading coronavirus pandemic, its neighbours are more than willing to help. Considering its strategic location in the Indian Ocean Region, it is safe to say, for now, the tides are turning in Maldives favour, as help continues pouring in, majorly from its close neighbour and the perennially helpful, Democratic Republic of India.
Both China and India rely on safe trade routes crossing the Indian Ocean, so both countries aim to boost their clout in the area, asserts Daniel Balazs, a researcher at Nanyang University, Singapore and a commentator on Sino-Indian relations. He says, “For India, Maldives is a matter of security. If an external great power gains a foothold there, it can pose a threat to Indian national security. For China, it is a matter of sustained access to the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean. In other words: For India, it is a strategic issue. For China, it is economic. At least for the time being, this might change in the future—who knows?”
"For India, Maldives is a matter of security. [...] For India, it is a strategic issue. For China, it is economic."
- Daniel Balazs, a researcher at Nanyang University, Singapore
The Maldives combat COVID-19
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With 19 confirmed cases on the island, the situation is not as grim as compared to other parts of the world. However, with limited resources to deal with a pandemic, any help is appreciated. If reports on the leading Maldivian website The Edition.mv are anything to go by, the public health emergency declaration has allowed the government to introduce a series of unprecedented restrictive and social distancing measures, including a partial curfew in capital Male and its suburbs.
A nationwide shutdown of all guest houses, city hotels and spa facilities located on inhabited islands is also in effect. The Maldives has also enforced a blanket suspension of the on-arrival visa on March 27 in a bid to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus. Even before the visa suspension, the Maldives had closed its borders to arrivals from some of the worst-hit countries, including mainland China, Italy, Bangladesh, Iran, Spain, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. All direct flights to and from China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran were also cancelled and foreign cruise ships and yachts were banned from docking at any of the country’s ports.
As countries across the world continue to grapple under lockdowns, the Maldivian economy whose primary means of survival is tourism faces a tough time ahead.
In sickness and in health, and before that too
India was proactive in providing aid to the Maldives long before the situation on the island nation’s home turf got critical. More than a month before the Maldives reported its first two COVID-19 positive cases, on February 2, India sent a special flight operated by the Indian national carrier Air India to the city of Wuhan in the Hubei province of China, the epicentre of coronavirus, for the evacuation of its nationals. When the return flight landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, hundreds of happy faces heaved a sigh of relief. Amongst the people evacuated on this special flight, surprisingly, seven were Maldivian nationals along with 323 Indian nationals on board.
The Maldives’s Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid was swift to express his gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for this gesture as officially reported by India Today. The seven Maldivian nationals were then comfortably housed in Delhi for some days, according to Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid’s tweet.
This is not the first instance where India has stepped up to help the island nation. Ashutosh Nagda, a researcher of the Southeast Asia Research Programme at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, points out, that “as one of the first countries to recognise Maldives’ independence, India has maintained a strong historical relationship with the Indian Ocean island nation”. Citing potential motives as to what India seeks in developing nations like the Maldives, he explains, “Maldives’ importance to New Delhi lies in its strategic geographical location — located 700 km from the Lakshadweep islands and 1,200 km from India’s mainland, it is a crucial geostrategic and geo-economic nodal point, particularly within the ambit of the NDA government’s SAGAR policy,” he says.
Like every long-lasting friendship, the Indian-Maldivian bond has had its share of ups and downs, often due to an involvement of a third party - while some neighbours foster deep ties, why should the others be left far behind?
The third party
The current Indian government oversaw a rough phase of the bilateral relationship between India and the Maldives, due to the latter’s political instability. Abdulla Yameen’s election as president in 2013 heralded a particularly low point, with his pro-China tilt. However, with President Ibrahim Solih coming to power in 2018, normalcy has calmly returned between the two nations.
Nagda affirms in the paper he wrote for the Economic and Political Weekly, that the past five years have made it amply clear that India needs to be cautious of China’s rapidly growing clout in the region. In his paper, titled, ‘How India Funds the World: Financial Assistance in the Immediate Neighbourhood’, the researcher points out that between 2013-2018, Maldives tilted heavily towards China.
Whispers from across the Great Wall
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A research study in the Indian Journal of Foreign Affairs, published in 2016 by researchers Obja Borah Hazarika and Vivek Mishra, sheds light on why China is looking south-west. South Asia is important to China for several reasons, their study states. Apart from being contiguous to Tibet and Xinjiang, South Asia is important for China as major trade routes and sea lanes of communications straddle this region. The region provides China with a huge market and has the potential to emerge as a source of raw materials.
Until 2011, Maldives was not a priority in China’s foreign policy; Beijing did not even have an embassy in Male. However, Sino-Maldivian relations have grown remarkably since Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the archipelago in September 2014. China has replaced Europe as Maldives’ largest source of tourists thus increasing its role in the Maldivian economy. A Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between China and the Maldives was one of its kind and sent some tumultuous waves across the Indian ocean, alerting India. As reported by Dr Sudha Ramchandran for The Diplomat, the Maldives became the second South Asian country after Pakistan to sign an FTA with China on December 8, 2017. In addition to the FTA, Maldives signed a Memorandum of Understanding that brought it into the Maritime Silk Route - a component of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
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The Indian Ocean’s blue-eyed entity
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The Maldives play a key role in Asia's growing geopolitical competition. The archipelago is adjacent to the main regional shipping routes, making it an important Indian Ocean toehold.
For front office manager Marty Pan of the Hard Rock Hotel in the Maldives, a day at work offers zero respites as guests are constantly on the move, checking in and out - leading Pan to a busy life on the Emboodhoo lagoon of the Maldives - 'the paradise' as it is famously known.
The buzz in Pan’s busy life came to a turbulent slow down when on March 8, the Maldives reported its first two cases of the novel coronavirus with two hotel employees testing positive for COVID-19 at one of the luxury resorts in the archipelago. The slowdown was further dragged when on March 12, the island nation announced a state of a public health emergency followed by a lockdown.
With his last batch of guests departing from the hotel on March 31, the remote island in the Maldives now has just Pan and his colleagues on it. While being segregated on remote islands across the country keeps them safe, for Pan and many others like him, life has been drastically disrupted by the pandemic.
With no guests to cater to, Pan has a routine that is in complete contrast with his daily line of work. Pan’s present workday involves leisure fishing trips around the island’s beaches and reef surfing, activities usually considered a hard-earned privilege
Thinking realistically
N. Sathiya Moorthy is at present Senior Fellow & Director of the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation. An expert in South Asian studies, Moorthy stresses that India is thinking in the right direction.
Drawing on from India’s defensive motives - it could be safe to say that India is thinking from a realist perspective. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states, which are concerned with their own security, act in pursuit of their own national interests.
“Geo-strategically, southern island-neighbours like the Maldives and Sri Lanka have emerged as the first line of defence for India, and the first line of offence for an adversarial power. Whether in terms of intelligence-gathering or keeping watch, India cannot afford the same,” Moorthy says.
The Indian help to the Maldives hence becomes an important arm for New Delhi’s body of South Asian work. Moorthy explains, “Geopolitically, India used to be seen as the largest power and leader in South Asia, despite the continuing adversity of Pakistan (West) and China (East) on the land wings in the North. South Asia, especially the seas, used to be known as the ‘traditional sphere of Indian influence’. India needs to retain that status and also build on the same, with the common good, starting with strategic security, stability, and sovereignty of these nations in mind. As then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his time, “India is the net provider of security in South Asia”, and it continues to remain so and is also seen as being so. Here security transcends the traditional sense, and includes human security against tsunamis and virus-attacks of the COVID-kind, both of which smaller nations, here or elsewhere, are ill-equipped to handle, whether in terms of financial resources or human resources, or others.”
Elaborating on China’s motives to make inroads in the Maldives, Moorthy says, “China has global ambitions. It needs to tie down India to South Asia if it were not to emerge as a competitor for the global space from South Asia. It is like the forgotten competition between the erstwhile Soviet Union and western Europe (EU, NATO, etc.) as parallel powers from that part of the world for a say in global affairs, all around. With US help, Western Europe witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. In its efforts of global out-reach, China seems to be following up on the American ‘Cold War model’, of making friends and influencing nations in South Asia and elsewhere. In the case of the Maldives and other Indian Ocean nations abutting India, China is also looking at a long-term containment strategy viz. India,” he explains.
Seeking opportunities under blankets of aid - a mirror image of geo-strategies?
It’s not just China or India trying to flex muscles to make friends and influential allies. Someone in Moscow is acting in a similar manner in order to safeguard its geopolitical interests. History often repeats itself and Cold War strategies take a new contemporary shape in modern-day dynamic. The ongoing Indian-Maldivian relationship and resulting aid to combat COVID-19 resembles a similar geo-strategically fuelled relationship between Russia and Moldova.
It was on March 27, that Russia sent humanitarian aid to Moldova to assist the landlocked country to combat COVID-19. Shipments containing coronavirus testing systems from Russia were delivered to Moldova. Just as Indian aid to the Maldives is not only aimed at combatting COVID-19, Russia is known to have strings attached to its aid to Moldova.
With its geographical position serving as a borderland between Russia and the European Union, Moldova has been on the periphery of the Western political and economic system for a long time now. This empowers Russia with softer powers of influence over the former Soviet republic. In 2007 Russia used foreign aid as an essential instrument to create influence over Moldova, outside of Transnistria.
One should keep in mind that Russia began working towards creating influence in Moldova post the Crimea episodes, where confrontations between the Soviets and the West evolved and solidified. Thus, unlike the 1990s and most of the 2000s, Russia began paying substantially larger attention to its relations with the East-Central European States. The Eastern EU states are best considered as the frontline zone following the Crimea confrontation: Positive relations between these states and Russia could result in neutralizing any perceived threats as feared to Russian security.
Is India following the same logic in developing relations with the blue-eyed entity of the Indian Ocean?
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India sowing seeds of reliability - locally
The influence of India’s help to the Maldives is not just political. India's prominent presence is a head-turner at the root level too. Among the citizens of the island nation, India is often regarded as the dependable elder brother.
Ahmed Sameen, a 30-year-old banker with Bank Maldives, says, “the aid is definitely helping the country, even if India is helping symbolically. Whatever they give actually matters to us.” Talking about the Maldivian governments’ directives and initiatives to deal with the COVID19 crisis, Ahmed further adds, “what they are trying to do is to lay expectations for the region. The population puts India as a big brother in the region and that’s what they are doing. It now depends on the government of Maldives how they make this help reach the ground level.”
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In all, it is really important for India to constantly assist smaller nations which are of strategic importance, Indian researcher Nagda affirms, “we might not receive any material assistance from countries like the Maldives, but what we do receive is the trust which is of utmost importance for geostrategy of any country.” And if Ahmed’s words were to resonate with all Maldivian locals, New Delhi is striking all the right chords.
The government of India has for decades ensured that any export ban on food and other essential supplies that are in short supply for local consumers does not interfere with supplies for two of its smaller neighbours. One is the Maldives, the other is Bhutan. Better still, New Delhi has never made Maldivian civilian requirements a pawn in bilateral and regional diplomatic games of chess, Moorthy points out. “As Maldivians, alive to the realities of their circumstances acknowledge, everyone in the country, from the highest political office-holder to the lowly commoner in a distant island eagerly looks up to southern Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudy port to ship those supplies on a regular basis. This year-round, the Ramazan month commences in the last week of April. It remains to be seen if COVID’s threat and fears would have disappeared from Maldivian lands, homes, and faces. That alone will determine how much supplies Indian traders engaged in the Maldivian business will have to deliver – and when.”
The middleman always wins
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Like Marty Pan from the tourism industry and Ahmed Sameen of the banking sector, people from all across the 1,192 islands and islets of the archipelago wait for the lockdown to be lifted and go back to their normal life.
The island nation, having received constant help from India, China and now Europe, finds itself slowly crawling back to normal. With the tourism sector which drives more than 75% of the island nation’s economy coming to a point of complete rest, exhausting its fuel - the tourists - due to the travel restrictions; the Maldives need innovative strategies from its helpers as much as from its own government.
Can New Delhi, Ahmed’s local big brother bring substantial relief to the population of Maldives - is a question that needs answers through immediate actions. This could be achieved with motives beyond geopolitical interests, a serious thought for India and China to ponder and act upon. While India itself fights a tough battle trying to contain the COVID-19 situation on its home turf that houses more than 1.39 billion people, only the limited can be logically expected.
On the other hand, with China globally announcing potential success against the COVID-19 as it starts to lift the lockdown in Wuhan, it finds itself moving miles ahead of India in proving its reliability towards providing help during the pandemic. This could substantially improve the Sino-Maldivian relationship, helping China gain a geopolitical advantage eventually.
So, in conclusion, there are chances that the Maldivians and even the executive branch of the incumbent administration view both India and China as vital allies. Maldivian citizen Umer Hilmy, editorial director, Dhiconomist, points out, “as our economic woes deepen in the post coronavirus era, it is likely that we might even adjust our stance towards a more balanced or even possibly pro-China policy. It would largely depend on the amount of financial assistance being offered as we are headed towards a recession, with the World Bank predicting a reduction in Maldivian GDP between 8.5 % to 13%. A situation that will have a tangible effect on the 295 lives of many Maldivians. Our attitude will soften, and loyalty will bend towards those who assist us at this time,” he signs off.
About the Authors
Aarti Bhanushali, India
In the bid to keep her wanderlust aspirations thriving, she quit her newsroom job as a features writer in India to join the Mundus cohort. Her interests lie in human interest stories and long-form features. She is currently enrolled with the University of Amsterdam specialising in Media and Politics.
Xiaoming Dou, China
Xiaoming has a background in Broadcast Journalism and English Studies. She used to work for Hong Kong Satellite Television as a correspondent, after interning with Xinhua News Agency and GDTV. As a Mundus student, she participated in the C40 World Mayors Summit, Copenhagen 2019 as a simultaneous interpreter.
