China-India Brief #154

Guest Column

The Maldives slipping away from China towards India in Indian Ocean game play 

By David Scott    

Photo from Prime Minister's Office of India

Around the Indian Ocean, India and China continue their circumspect rivalry to gain advantage among the various island states.

India has now moved into a leading position in the Maldives, with China faced with some uncomfortable growing local criticism. The Maldives’ significance is geopolitical, reflecting its islands location on the trade routes of the Western Indian Ocean, and proximity to India. During the past decade, it has attracted the growing rival attentions of China and India. Under Abdullah Gayoom, the Maldives tilted toward Beijing and was heavily involved in China’s Maritime Silk Road infrastructure initiative.

However, opposition victories in the presidential elections of September 2018 and parliamentary elections of April 2019 witnessed a tilt back towards New Delhi, in what the Maldives declared as its “India First” policy. India has responded to this quickly.  Narendra Modi attended Ibrahim Solih’s inauguration ceremony in November 2018, a visit denounced in the Chinese state media with the Global Times article titled “India’s wooing of Maldives’ leader ‘risks China ties’” (November 18, 2018). Indian offers of financial assistance to offset Maldivian debts to China were again denounced in the Global Times article titled “Maldives would be wise to shun meaningless ‘gift’ from New Delhi” (November 29, 2018). In turn, Modi’s trip to the Maldives in June 2019 was the first overseas trip of his second term in the government.

Maldivian disenchantment with China, and drawing closer back to India, was evident as the Maldivian Speaker of Parliament and leader of the ruling party the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) Mohammed Nasheed attended the Ideas Conclave 2020 held in Gujarat on February 28, 2020.

On the one hand, Nasheed noted democratic cooperation with India:

Indian projects in the Maldives are transparent and everyone knows what is going on. Everybody knows the price of it. Indian projects tendered by Government of India are transparent. It is very rare, has almost never happened that any of these have become a debt trap.

On the other hand, Nasheed brought in China:

We've another superpower coming to the Indian Ocean—China. Unfortunately, the manner in which this superpower is treating the Indian Ocean islands is very, very different.

This generated an immediate Chinese response—its ambassador to the Maldives, Zhang Lizhong, tweeting on February 29 that Nasheed should be “commending one's partner [India] without comparing another partner [China],” and reiterated “we develop ties with the countries in Indian Ocean on Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence & [sic] will continue to make contributions.”

Nasheem’s criticisms of China were evident in his official visit to India in December 2019, leading a parliamentary delegation, telling the Indian Vice-President that the Maldives was “keen to disentangle from China’s debt trap.” Nasheed’s repetition on Indian TV of the “debt trap” nature of Chinese-Maldives deals sparked another round of tweets by Zhang Lizhong about Nasheem’s “sensational but baseless remarks on China.” 

That same day, talking to the media after co-chairing the India-Maldives Joint Commission meeting with his counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Maldives’ Foreign Minister Abdullah Shahid announced in December that it was seeking to restructure the $1.4 billion debt accrued under the previous Gayoom regime, while ruling out any debt-to-equity swap mechanism—precisely the sort of arrangement that had brought Hambantota in Sri Lanka under Chinese operational control. In his talks with Narendra Modi, Shahid conveyed “the commitment of the leadership of Maldives to its ‘India First’ policy.” Maldivian economic cooperation with China is still on the table but subject to restructuring of present debt and with the 2018 Free Trade Agreement on hold.

In retrospect, the India-Maldives Joint Commission meeting on December 13, 2019 was an important moment. This was the first meeting in 4 years, the Joint Commission having been in abeyance under the previous regime of Abdullah Gayoom. The decisions recorded in the Joint Press Statement pushing Maldives-India defence cooperation were significant, specifically including:

• “key infrastructure projects such as…the setting up of the Coastal Surveillance Radar System,”
• “as well as joint exercises,”
• “the Maldivian side acknowledged the usefulness of CGS [Coast Guard Ship] Kaamiyaab gifted by the Government of India for the enhancement of its maritime security,”
• “both Ministers emphasized the nurturing of a strong bilateral partnership in the maritime domain given the shared interests and common challenges in the Indian Ocean Region,” 
• “illustrating the highest importance both India and Maldives attach to the bilateral relationship.”

Politically, both sides noted that India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy and Maldives’ ‘India First’ policy “were working in tandem.”

At the Raisina Dialogue, Shahid’s talks on January 15, 2020 with India’s Chief of Defense Staff showed strategic harmony, recording a mutual “commitment to strong cooperation in the areas of defence and security affairs, between the Maldives and India, for peace and security of the Indian Ocean.” During an interview with the South China Morning Post, Shahid stated that while the Maldives did not want a bad relationship with China, Beijing “must remember that our relationship with India is special.” He further indicated that “with geopolitical rivalries over the Indian Ocean heating up, the Maldives will tie its fortunes to India even at the risk of displeasing China.” Corruption enquiries on Chinese links with the Gayoom administration were announced on January 16, to be concluded by June.

At the political level, India has some soft power advantages over China. On January 27, the Maldivian Ministry of Foreign Affairs profiled bilateral links under the title “The principles of the Indian Constitution inspires the world, and the Maldives.” No one has ever particularly cited the Chinese constitution as an inspiration for other nations. Shahid’s own greeting to Jaishankar was that “as the largest democracy in the world, India continues to inspire us” and as such “we greatly value our relationship with India, and the strong development partnership between our countries. I am confident that the friendly relations existing between our countries will grow from strength to strength in the days ahead.” On another level, the Maldivian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded on March 2 that his country “deeply appreciated” the Indian Government arranging for Air India to evacuate Maldivian nationals from Wuhan, an unforeseen twist further strengthening India-Maldivian links in the wake of China’s coronavirus epidemic.

David Scott is a prolific writer on India and China foreign policy. The Indo-Pacific analyst for the NATO Defense College Foundation, a Member of the Center for International Maritime Security, and Associate Member of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies – he can be contacted at decb64_ZGF2aWRzY290dDM2NkBvdXRsb29rLmNvbQ==_decb64.

The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy or the National University of Singapore.

News Reports

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Egyptian Health Minister Hala Zayed departed from Cairo on Sunday evening (March 1) for the Chinese capital Beijing to convey Egypt's solidarity with China in combating the novel coronavirus.

News Reports

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Analyses

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South China Morning Post, March 8

By David Dodwell, Executive Director, Hong Kong-APEC Trade Policy Study Group

While China has lifted an estimated 850 million out of extreme poverty, with just 3.1 per cent now living in poverty, almost 22 per cent of India’s population still lives in extreme poverty. But as US President Donald Trump hugged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in front of 130,000 people at a stadium in Ahmedabad, in western India, last week, it was clear that some are reluctant to be convinced.

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Books and Journals

The Indo-Pacific: a ‘new’ region or the return of history?
Australian Journal of International Affairs 74(2): 124–146

By Manjeet S. Pardesi, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington.

The term ‘Indo-Pacific’ has now entered the strategic lexicon to refer to strategic Asia. In contrast to the dominant themes in the scholarly literature that emphasise its ‘newness’ and conceive it as a maritime space, I argue that Asia's three sub-regions (South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia) and two oceans (Indian and Western Pacific) have constituted a single strategic system for the past two centuries (with the notable exception of the last three decades of the Cold War). Importantly, future regional order in this ‘larger Asia’ will emerge from the interdependence of continental and maritime power. Approaching International Relations as an historical social science, I construct a new historical narrative to explain region (trans)formation. This larger strategic Asia that first emerged around the time of the ‘great divergence’ between the West and the rest was created by a rising Britain through its Indian base. While Cold War geopolitics ‘split’ Asia into smaller sub-regions, the rise of China and India is reversing this split. The contemporary re-emergence of the Indo-Pacific allows the United States to create a regional distribution of power and a regional distribution of status (through discourse) that favours the United States in an increasingly multipolar region.