Mohamad Muizzu, the recent president-elect of the Maldives, has found himself at odds with the Indian government. The Maldives’ strategic location in the Indian Ocean has been of great interest to both India and China. Though Muizzu claims he is not “pro-anybody,” there are deeper signs that the Maldives will continue to fit into China’s greater plans.
“The Maldives is too small to get entangled with this global power struggle,” Mohamad Muizzu, set to take on the role of president of the Indian Ocean archipelago, on November 17th, said. Muizzu claimed in an interview with the BBC that a few days after his election, he met the Indian ambassador in the Maldives, demanding that all Indian troops — a few dozen soldiers settled in 2021 to operate and maintain two helicopters and one small aircraft given as a gift by India — be removed from the string of islands.
Muizzu’s statement strikes a chord due to the tense relations between China and India, with several belligerent skirmishes and conflicts occurring amidst their borders from the 1960s up until the 2020s. According to Muizzu, denying India or China a hub in the Maldives is a matter of security.
However, the background of the election already set the stage for a “pro-India vs pro-China” debate. His opponent in the general election, incumbent Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), presented himself as an openly pro-India candidate. Muizzu claims to be only pro-Maldives. However, his party called the People’s National Congress (PNC), has a pro-China history.
Muizzu is PNC’s replacement for ex-president Abdulla Yameen, a figure involved in scandals who was supposed to run for the 2023 presidential election. A high-profile 2018 corruption scandal, first exposed by Al-Jazeera in 2016, implicated Yameen as the mastermind behind a plot to embezzle 1.5 billion dollars of public funds. Yameen was sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined 5 million dollars, and disallowed from participating in the election.
During his presidency from 2013 to 2018, Yameen was also accused of several counts of human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch found that Maldives used vaguely worded laws to target dissenting journalists, particularly from 2016 onwards. HRW cites testimonies of victims claiming that Maldivian officials carried out stabbings and shootings of public figures who criticized the government, though these were denied by the government.
The impact of these abuses was that no country was willing to bail out debts accrued by Yameen’s administration, except China, which gave him a loan with “no conditions,” a recurring trend in poor countries where China is involved. While Yameen is still sentenced for his crimes, he was just released by Muizzu from a high-security prison to house arrest, following Muizzu’s recent election.
Yameen’s presidency cultivated links with China, namely, by buying into their Belt & Road initiative, which seeks to create a global roadmap between China and the rest of the world. And the new president is set to further cultivate these links.
The interest of both India and China in the Maldives
Both India and China have shown interest in providing the Maldives with projects to improve the islands’ infrastructure and interconnectivity.
India began the Thilamalé Bridge project with the Maldives, seeking to connect the capital island Malé with three of its islands. The project is set to be completed by May 2024.
The Sinamalé Bridge was built by China already linking Malé and two other islands belonging to the Maldives, commissioned in 2014 and opened in September 2018.
Both countries have commissioned loans to the Maldives for development. India commissioned a line of credit of 50 million dollars for the development of defense projects, and has provided economic aid. The Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital was built in the Maldives as a gift from the Indian government.
All the same, the Maldives has received many loans from China and infrastructure projects, such as a huge housing project, and building more than 10,000 housing units in the Maldives.
However, it is apparent that the debt from the Maldives to China is growing. Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives from 2008 to 2012 estimated that the country has a 3.4 billion dollars debt to China. He described India’s influence as “low-cost” loans, making them more beneficial for the Maldives. Chinese officials denied this figure and claimed that the loan stood at 1.5 billion dollars. The Maldives has a gross domestic product of 5 billion dollars.
Since Muizzu was elected, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared that he “stands ready to work with President-elect Muizzu to deepen practical cooperation.”
Maldives is a crucial part of China’s Maritime Silk Road project, formerly known as the String of Pearls initiative, which seeks to control the maritime hubs for trade between China and the Middle East.
Doing this involves wrestling control of the Indian Ocean from India, including the Maldives. This project has led to countries across three different continents owing a debt to China, due to the infrastructure built at their ports for maritime trade. Some of these debts occupy significant portions of these countries’ GDP.
Muizzu has already publicly shown interest in China’s Belt and Road initiative. “I think Belt and Road Development can play a very crucial role in our development and also the development of all the countries in this initiative,” Muizzu said.
