India-Maldives Row | Coercive diplomacy often backfires

The Right-wing ecosystem, created and nurtured by the ruling BJP, has taken over, setting Indian diplomacy on a collision course with that of the tiny island nation.

Unless there was a deep-rooted controversy which ordinary mortals cannot fathom, it may not have been Prime Minister Modi’s intention to pitch Lakshadweep tourism against that of the Maldives.

Modi’s Lakshadweep photos showed us a slightly stooping old man emerging from the sea, somewhat forgivably in a life-vest, and sitting on a chair in his sky-blue pyjama-kurta, and wrapped in a shawl despite the sultry heat of the Indian Ocean islands. It could well have been a tourism promotion for ‘Take your grandparents to the seaside’.

This was no Vladimir Putin fishing bare-chested in a freezing Siberian river or scuba diving in the Black Sea and bringing up two ceramic urns from the archaeological excavations of the submerged 4th century Greek city of Phanagoria. Yet the pics seem to have fed a muscular nationalist frenzy.

The Right-wing ecosystem, created and nurtured by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has taken over, setting Indian diplomacy on a collision course with that of the tiny island nation. Alarmingly India’s diplomatic agenda is being set up by the Twitterati and that the Ministry of External Affairs, instead of dousing the fire, has been playing along.

The tweets by three dilettante junior ministers of the Maldives ‘insulting’ the Indian Prime Minister should have been ignored, or dealt with quietly.

Instead, the Indian establishment has bought into a zero-sum narrative: Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu is ‘anti-India’ and, therefore, he must be totally ‘pro-China’. Muizzu’s inclination towards China is well known — that is the electoral selling point of his party, the Peoples’ National Congress. Although he has done away with Indian military presence in the Maldives it is unclear whether he is willing to completely alienate India.

Despite Muizzu’s pro-China political proclivities, even he knows that India is close and China is far, and that India can engineer trouble for him easily. India has been the first responder to all crises that the Maldives has faced — from quashing a coup by foreign mercenaries in 1988, providing emergency relief after a Tsunami in 2004, and rushing in Indian Navy ships with desalination plants to deal with  a drinking water crisis in 2014 to tackling the Covid-19 crisis in 2020.

This was not done out of altruism. India’s objectives ranged from asserting its area of influence, following up on its ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy, countering strategic competition from China, and attempting to increase its influence among its Indian Ocean neighbours.

India’s smaller neighbours — Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives — face the dilemma of dealing with a ‘Big Brother’ who can be both generous and heavy-handed. They are compelled to manoeuvre within these constraints.

Like the other former pro-China president of the Maldives, Abdullah Yameen, who was his political mentor, Muizzu must know how far he can go. Despite Yameen’s ‘India out’ emblazoned on his election campaign T-shirt, when in power he ensured that the relationship was not damaged irreparably.

Muizzu may not be as adroit as Yameen in separating election rhetoric from reality, but sooner or later he will have to be practical and foster friendly ties with India. That is the direction in which Indian diplomacy should have encouraged him to traverse. Yet exactly the opposite seems to be happening.

Not only are the people of the Maldives being punished, there is public gloating over it. India contributed $380 million to tourism in the Maldives in 2023, with Indian tourists accounting for 11.2 percent of the total arrivals (1.84 million) last year. Sycophantic celebrities in India have given calls to boycott the Maldives threatening its tourism revenue. Indian tour operators have reported a sudden and significant drop in enquires for the Maldives with Indian tour operators witnessing a 40 per cent decline in bookings. The prices of holiday packages for the island nation have dropped with declining demand and an Indian flight booking site stopped taking bookings for the Maldives ‘in solidarity with our nation’.

Before one goes further it is important to ask whether it is only the Maldivian economy that is hurt by this boycott. Indian tour operators are also losing business. There are about 60 flights a week from India to the Maldives and of these 50 are run by Indian owned airlines — Indigo, Air India, Vistara, and Air India Express. They too will suffer and may have to cancel flights.

Amidst this boycott hullabaloo, why should Indians take affront if the Maldivian President asks China to send more tourists to his country? It is his job to promote his country which is heavily dependent on the tourism economy. He may not be responding to the ‘Boycott Maldives’ in India.

Tourism flows between two countries often follow the ups and downs in diplomatic relations between them. China used to dominate the Maldivian tourism market from 2014 to 2020 when India upstaged it in terms of number of tourists.

Coercive diplomacy by threatening its tourism economy will not win the love of the Maldivians however dependent they are on India. No one should know this better than the mandarins of the Indian foreign office. Did extreme coercive diplomacy of ‘surgical strikes’ against Pakistan, first after Uri and later in Balakot aerial bombing, result in end to terrorism originating in Pakistan? The answer can be best given by the families of the four soldiers killed by terrorists in Kashmir last month.

When India was upset with the newly adopted Nepal Constitution in September 2015, a harsh six month blockade was imposed on a hapless, landlocked country which caused immense suffering. As a result, the Chinese footprint in Nepal increased dramatically and Nepal became forever wary of India.

Foreign office mandarins must know the utter futility of coercive diplomacy against the Maldives. Yet, like the Prime Minister, they seem completely as sea about the ineffectiveness of coercive diplomatic measures to promote India’s global stature. That is perhaps why there hasn’t been even a peep from them to stem the tide of hatred being promoted against the Maldives.

(Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.