In an effort to promote tourism in Lakshadweep after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit, several social media users ran a campaign with hashtags to boycott the Maldives. This elicited distasteful reactions from a section of Maldivian officials, including deputy ministers, which in turn led to a further war of words on social media. The Maldives suspended the deputy ministers — Malsha Shareef, Maryam Shiuna and Mahzoom Majid — for their comments on Mr. Modi and India and also clarified that their views were not official or shared by the government.
Moving closer to China
However, it is quite possible that the comments of the Maldivian officials were deliberate as they were made before the visit of the Maldivian president, Mohamed Muizzu, to China. Mr. Muizzu has taken a significant pro-China stand compared to his predecessor. His election campaign in 2023 also contained anti-India rhetoric: he promised to remove Indian troops from the Maldives and balance trade relations, which he claimed were heavily tilted in India’s favour. During his recent visit to China’s Fujian Province, Mr. Muizzu stated that the Maldives’ number one market before COVID-19 was China and appealed to China to “intensify” its efforts to regain that position. China and the Maldives also elevated their bilateral ties to a ‘comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership’. In addition, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China “respects and supports the Maldives in exploring a development path suited to its national conditions”. According to the vocabulary of Chinese diplomacy, this means that China wants the Maldives to emerge out of India’s shadows. This is consistent with China’s efforts elsewhere, including in the United Nations, to delegitimise existing norms and rules by referring to “national conditions” in its official statements. The new agreements will in all likelihood increase China’s presence in the Maldives and its waters and allow China an increased digital and physical surveillance capability.
This visit has already emboldened the Maldives as President Muizzu has “requested” India to remove its military personnel, stationed on the archipelago for training Maldivian troops and for maintaining equipment, from his country by March 15. He also added that his country’s small size does not give anyone the licence to bully it.
India’s desire
India’s relationship with the Maldives, built over time, is a comprehensive one. While the Maldives needs India, it is true that India needs the Maldives equally. The Maldives is India’s key maritime neighbour in the Indian Ocean Region. It has also consistently taken pro-India positions in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
India desires to be a norm- builder in the new world order. However, there is a large gap between rhetoric and reality. India has had a difficult couple of years in diplomacy. Its position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not won it new friends. Similarly, its lack of willingness to take a clear position on the Israel-Hamas conflict is not going to help its popularity. In fact, as history suggests, there is always a competition between the desire to shape global norms and to be popular; it is impossible to do both at the same time. India has to make those hard choices and it must make them now. Similarly, populist rhetoric at home is not going to win India friends abroad, especially in the neighbourhood where smaller countries hedge their bets between India and another power, which has been China in most of the instances.
An aspiring great power should be able to project harmony between its own national interests and the interests of everyone else, most importantly its neighbours. When Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, he stressed the ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy. This has yielded mixed results at best. Last year, while organising the G20 summit, India used the theme, ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’, which Mr. Modi spoke of at length during his keynote speech. India makes the right noises at home and abroad, but when it comes to handling a small neighbour such as the Maldives, India and Indian social media take a wolf-warrior avatar rather than a globalist one.
When faced with global criticism on how it failed to stop COVID-19 from becoming a pandemic, China faced the world with combative and insensitive language that came to be known as wolf-warrior diplomacy. While that became popular at home in China, the world saw an admission of guilt in China’s behaviour. However, for China, this was only a reflection of its perception that the world was denying the country its rightful place in the international order. Through wolf-warrior diplomacy, China informed the world how its political system was better at handling the pandemic than the West. Wolf-warrior diplomats in China often defend China’s interests against what they perceive as hostility from abroad. Thereby, they resort to the rhetoric of authoritarianism as being more efficient than other systems and better at delivering the public good. The stand of social media warriors in India about the Maldives was not too different from this.
Recent incidents show that domestic sentiments will exacerbate India’s foreign policy challenge. And while this may be beneficial in an election year, it compounds India’s problems in a neighbourhood already fraught with various problems. The diplomatic row with the Maldives shows that India cannot wish to defeat China while at the same time behaving exactly like China does.
Avinash Godbole is Associate Professor and Associate Academic Dean at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, Jindal Global University
