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India-Maldives ties in flux as China’s growing sway causes New Delhi to fret
- The Maldives’ pro-China president has vowed to reduce dependence on India, but analysts say geopolitics mean he can’t give up on New Delhi entirely
- After a tense start to the year, the two neighbours appear to be warming to each other again – pushed by Male’s ‘deep economic difficulties’
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India and the Maldives appear to be mending fences, exchanging overtures to bolster their partnership in a diplomatic dance that analysts say is driven partly by New Delhi’s worry over China’s creeping influence in the Indian Ocean.
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Ties were strained after President Mohamed Muizzu, who came to power on an anti-India campaign, told Delhi to withdraw its troops from his country. The 89 soldiers had been operating and maintaining two helicopters and one fixed-wing aircraft that India previously gifted the Maldives.
India withdrew the last of its soldiers by the May 10 deadline the Maldives had set.
India, like many countries, is trying to manage China’s growing influence and “wouldn’t like to lose the Maldives completely”, said Harsh Pant, an international-relations professor at King’s College London.
“If the Maldives is trying to engage India more substantively then it is in India’s interest to reciprocate and that is what India is doing,” he said.
After a landslide victory for pro-China Muizzu in April’s parliamentary polls, the Maldivian government has been sending positive signals to India to advance economic ties, with Foreign Minister Moosa Zameer visiting India in May to discuss issues of “mutual interest”.
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