South Asia observers are monitoring a Chinese research vessel as it transits through the Indian Ocean en route to the Maldives for rotation of personnel and replenishment after being denied such by Sri Lanka, which imposed a year-long moratorium on hosting foreign research vessels starting last month. Even though the Maldives claimed that the vessel won’t conduct research in its waters, Indian media reported that Delhi is still closely tracking its activities, which worsens their incipient security dilemma.
Long story short, hardcore anti-Indian politician Mohamed Muizzu’s rise to the presidency last year led to him spiting his country’s largest neighbor at every turn, which went beyond his pledge to request the removal of its less than 100 military personnel who are mostly engaged in training and maintenance. He’s justified this policy as strengthening the Maldives’ sovereignty vis-à-vis India but “India’s Top Diplomat Lamented That The Maldives Doesn’t Want Mutually Beneficial Cooperation” anymore.
Muizzu’s trips to Turkiye and most recently China exacerbated India’s threat perception of his intentions seeing as how the first politically supports Delhi-designated terrorists-separatists in Kashmir while the latter is embroiled in a long-running territorial dispute with that South Asian Great Power. These concerns were heightened even further by the racist row provoked by some of his officials and his conspicuous lack of plans to visit India, which is traditionally the first trip that all new presidents make.
The unresolved Sino-Indo territorial dispute shapes all of Delhi’s regional policymaking formulations since its experts suspect that Beijing is slyly encircling it via strategic pacts with much smaller South Asian countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, and now (once again following a brief hiatus) the Maldives. India’s perceptions of various such Chinese moves with those countries sometimes led to trouble in their bilateral ties over the past decade, though trust with Nepal and Sri Lanka has since been repaired.
China denies that it has any plans to encircle India and dismisses this as a paranoid conspiracy theory, but from India’s perspective in this latest context with the Maldives, its research vessel’s mapping of the ocean floor could serve the dual purpose of assisting Chinese submarines’ travel via the Indian Ocean. One of the worst-case scenarios for India is that China establishes a permanent submarine base in its eponymous body of water or at least obtains the right to occasionally use related BRI port facilities.
It’s unimportant whether or not the reader agrees with this threat perception since it’s nevertheless the paradigm through which India formulates some of its policy towards the much smaller states that surround it such as the Maldives. Muizzu’s hardcore anti-Indian policies, which some believe are partially driven by Islamist sympathies that distort his views of majority-Hindu India’s intentions, have led to him weaponizing these aforesaid perceptions in a dangerous game aimed at maliciously spiting India.
In his mind, he apparently thinks that provoking it in “plausibly deniable” ways that his supporters at home and abroad gaslight as nothing more than so-called “sovereign moves” will somehow or another give the Maldives an edge over India, but these calculations are devoid of substance. After all, it’s never explained by him or his surrogates how they envisage translating deteriorating ties with India and the subsequent worsening of their incipient security dilemma into tangible benefits for average Maldivians.
In fact, the natural outcome of this policy is that average Maldivians will suffer upon the reduction of trade, investment, and tourism, none of which can be fully replaced by China and/or Turkiye. Those two could superficially fill the void left by India in various industries, but there’ll be a disruption during the transition, and it can’t be taken for granted that the final quality will be the same. It’s therefore reckless to risk these consequences since there were never any serious problems with India in the first place.
Muizzu’s unilateral decision to add a military dimension to their growing number of disputes that he provoked without reason and purely due to his ideologically driven anti-Indian zeal is very dangerous since it manipulates India’s threat perception of alleged Chinese encirclement. It almost seems as though he’s trying to trigger a major reaction from India that he could then exploit to justify whatever his next preplanned move might be but which would appear too provocative without that reaction preceding it.
He needs to realize that he’s playing with fire by recklessly worsening the incipient Maldivian-Indian security dilemma through his decision to let a Chinese research vessel dock in his country despite Delhi suspecting it of clandestinely mapping the ocean floor for assisting Chinese submarines. India is expected to react in a cool, calm, and collected manner to this latest provocation, but Muizzu would do well not to test its patience by partaking in anything more drastic, let alone anytime soon after this.
