Modi in his first overseas visit in the new term, extended an early hand to the two Indian Ocean neighbours to ensure collective security.
The two-day, two-nation visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Maldives and Sri Lanka over the weekend was as full of meaning(s) as the messages. The message and the meaning were one and the same, in both countries – little tolerance for terrorism and Modi 2.0 extending an early hand to work with the two Indian Ocean neighbours to ensure their collective security.
Modi was the first regional/world leader to visit Sri Lanka after the Easter Day serial-blasts that claimed over 250 lives. With that, he also paid homage to the victims at the St Anthony’s Shrine in the city, which was one of the three churches that were among the six terror-targets. “Terror cannot defeat the spirit of Sri Lanka...India stands in solidarity with the people of Sri Lanka,” he said after the church-visit.
But it was in Maldives that Modi’s anti-terrorism plank attracted greater global attention and rightly so. "Terrorism is the biggest challenge, not only for a country or a region but the entire world. Not a single day goes when terrorists do not strike,” he said in what was the second Indian prime ministerial address to the People’s Majlis or Maldivian Parliament, after predecessor Manmohan Singh in November 2011.
“State sponsorship of terrorism is the biggest threat," the Prime Minister said in a rare but veiled reference to a third country, Pakistan in this case, on the soil of a friendly nation. Terrorists “do not have bank accounts but still they have no dearth of money,” he pointed out. In an equally loaded message to the West and the East alike, he said a mistake was being made by drawing a distinction between a good terrorist and a bad terrorist.
Modi did not spare China either. Without taking names, he talked of two issues of Indian concern. In an obvious reference to the increasing global demand for a ‘rules-based’ order in the Indian Ocean, he indicated that Indo-Pacific was "our lifeline, our trade route and the key to our future" and there is a need for all countries to work together for "openness, integration and balance" as it will increase trust.
The PM’s other reference was related to perceptions where in he said that in the name of development-funding, China was pushing unsuspecting third world countries into a ‘debt-trap’. In Male, Modi said that India’s financial assistance to the nation would not push the future generations of Maldivians into ‘debilitating debt’. Instead, India shared its progress and development to empower its neighbours, and not to force them into dependency.
Modi declared that India had based its ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy guided by the policies of Mahatma Gandhi. He proclaimed that the two South Asian allies could set an example to the world in establishing peace and security in the Indian Ocean region. To this end, Modi and Solih together inaugurated an India-donated networked radar surveillance system, for Maldives to try and secure its large seas, apart from training facilities for the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF).
During his short stay in Male, Modi ‘held wide-ranging (delegation-level) talks’ with President Solih, for which much ground work had obviously been done by diplomats on both sides, earlier. During the visit, the two nations signed six agreements of mutual cooperation, aimed at India funding community-based projects identified by the host Government, going beyond faceless ‘budgetary support’ in the past.
Under the $ 800-m allotted out of New Delhi’s $ 1.4-b commitment during Solih’s maiden overseas presidential visit to New Delhi, India is now supplying ambulances and a ‘student ferry’, apart from funding water and drainage schemes in islands, these being among a few identified by the host Government. The bilateral efforts also cover training for Maldivian civil administrators, healthcare and higher education, thus improving ‘bilateral connect’ at all levels.
With the exit of President Abdulla Yameen, India had restored all ban-free essentials’ imports by Maldives. They had also sorted out Yameen’s asking India to take back two ‘gift helicopters’, used for coastal surveillance and ferrying of emergency patients across islands. Going beyond the existing Male-Thoothukudy link, this time, the two leaders announced the future launch of a Kulhuduffushi-Kochi ferry service, proposed by the Nasheed presidency in 2011 but delayed due to internal assessments in India.
Going beyond the obvious, the PM’s two-nation visit also has many other firsts to its credit. With this, Modi becomes the first Indian VVIP to visit Maldives (at least) twice, that too, in successive years. Including the open-air session of the Parliament, where Solih took an oath on November 10 2018, Modi becomes the only world leader to have been present in the House, twice.
At the end of their talks in the President’s Office, Solih conferred on Modi, the title of the “Most Honourable Order of the Distinguished Rule of Nishan Izzuddeen", the highest State honour for a foreigner, the first Indian to be so decorated. If this was possibly in recognition of the tough and open Indian position on ‘democracy issues’ under Yameen, during Modi 1.0, neither side mentioned it in any form.
In both capitals, Modi’s tight schedule included meeting with political party leaders and community representatives. In Maldives, it was with leaders of the four-party ruling coalition, including Solih’s MDP, whose boss, Mohammed Nasheed, a former President, is also the Speaker of Parliament. Welcoming Modi to the House later, Nasheed presented the Prime Minister with a copy of the nation’s First Republican Constitution, dated 1931, which came into force a year later.
In Colombo, Modi met with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, leaders of the Tamil-majority TNA and also those of Muslim parties, whose community members feel threatened, physically and emotionally, because the perpetrators of the Easter blasts belonged to the community. Ahead of Modi’s visit, Rajapaksa, whose nominee has a likely chance of winning the nation’s presidential polls in December, welcomed India’s lead in fighting terrorism in the region, but drew a distinction on mutual perceptions about Pakistan and China.
As coincidence would have it, Modi started off his two-nation visit after worshipping at the Sri Krishna Temple at Guruvayur, Kerala, and rounded it off at the Balaji Temple in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. They were possibly post-poll thanks-giving for Modi, and timed to save time for the Prime Minister, who would otherwise have to make separate trip(s) to the South.
Though unmentioned, it could have been a message that in terms of terror-fighting, especially after past instances, including the Easter Day attacks in Sri Lanka, with alleged Kerala/Tamil Nadu links, New Delhi has come to look at common threats and security perceptions, more holistically than in the past. It is also in possible recognition of the inherent resource constraints faced by the two southern neighbours in facing off and fending off terrorism, especially at and from sea, where India could be at the other end, post 26/11, especially.
Yet, the message from Modi’s two-nation, first overseas visit of his second term is clear. One, the distance between Delhi and the neighbourhood capitals, especially in the south of the Vindhyas, is only in the mind and not in methods. Where there is a will, there is a way, and Modi has demonstrated it for the regional nations to see.
Yet, there is also the need from the other nation’s perspective, for Indian Prime Minister’s to spend more time in their nations and as frequently as their leader visit New Delhi. For instance, Modi’s visit to Maldives and Sri Lanka had concluded even before his message and their meanings had sunk in. If taking an annual break in the tourism-laden neighbourhood would help send out a message, Indian leaderships should think of it – and also encourage Indian corporates to host their annual conferences, etc, over there.
Going beyond this, Indian leaderships need to convince the neighbourhood, their peoples and polity that their nations deserved more than a ‘stop-over’ kind of Indian leadership visits, again very infrequently. India matters more to the neighbours than to others. New Delhi should hence consider annual bilateral and tri-lateral neighbourhood summits, as with the industrialised West and East alike.
The visit could mean that Modi 2.0 would focus on the Indian Ocean security cooperation to terrorism, leaving larger issues of a ‘rules-based order’ and the like to the US-led Quad. This became evident as Modi did not make any direct or not-so-direct reference to such issues and confined his speeches and statements to terrorism-related issues.
Going beyond the Indian borders, New Delhi under Modi 2.0 is ready to take on cooperative regional challenges of the fundamentalist/terrorist kind, after decade-old successes on the Bangladesh front. It’s the kind of messianic role that President George Bush, Jr, had donned in the US, in terms of fighting global terrorism impacting on the ‘homeland’, but that had a restricted electoral use for him owing to the two-term constitutional upper-limit in his country.
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N. Sathiya Moorthy is a policy analyst and commentator based in Chennai.
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