The recent election victory of Muizzu indicates that Maldives may lean towards China in the coming years
Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu’s People’s National Congress (PNC) won a landslide victory in the country’s parliamentary elections, taking 66 seats in a 93-member house. The scale of the victory confirms the authority of the pro-China leader who had come to power after winning the presidential elections in 2023, and it signals that the geopolitical jostling between India and China is likely to deepen in the coming years.
Among his first actions after coming into power was to demand that India withdraw nearly 90 Indian military personnel who were stationed in Maldives to maintain and operate two helicopters and an aircraft donated by India a few years ago for rescue and reconnaissance work.
Even as the process of removing Indian military personnel from the island was being negotiated, Maldives signed a defence cooperation agreement with China in March 2024. Details were not provided, but were said to be in line with the decision taken during Muizzu’s visit to Beijing in January to elevate the ties between the two countries to a “Comprehensive Strategic and Cooperative Partnership.” The key part of the agreement was that China would provide free military assistance to Maldives.
The scale of the victory confirms the authority of the pro-China leader who had come to power after winning the presidential elections in 2023, and it signals that the geopolitical jostling between India and China is likely to deepen in the coming years.
Muizzu, a protégé of former President Abdulla Yameen, won the election in 2023 on the “India Out” campaign, aimed at ending the “India-first” policy of the Maldives Democratic Party headed by Ibrahim Solih that had ruled the country between 2018-2023.
After negotiations, India agreed to pull back its personnel and two batches of Indian personnel have already left, replaced by civilian technical staff. The last of the personnel will leave by 10 May. The Maldives are barely 70 nautical miles from India’s Minicoy islands and some 300 nautical miles from the mainland’s west coast. It’s located as a hub of sorts between sea lanes coming from the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, passing adjacent to India and Sri Lanka and going on through the Andaman Sea to the Strait of Malacca.
Muizzu’s actions in the months since he came to power have indicated the lines of his policy. Instead of the customary first foreign visit to India, he visited Türkiye within weeks of assuming power and there he signed up for several surveillance drones to patrol the country’s vast Exclusive Economic Zone. His first meeting with Prime Minister Modi took place on the sidelines of the COP28 Summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on 1 December 2023.
In January, to underscore the shift away from India, Muizzu visited China on a five-day state visit. Here he signed 20 agreements, including one on tourism cooperation. Some of them were billed as part of the BRI.
The visit took place after the controversy arising from Prime Minister Modi promoting Lakshadweep as a tourism destination. A social media campaign to boycott tourism to Maldives led to some Maldivian ministers passing derogatory comments against Prime Minister Modi. These ministers were quickly suspended by Muizzu.
The Maldives are barely 70 nautical miles from India’s Minicoy islands and some 300 nautical miles from the mainland’s west coast.
For the record, in 2023, the official figures show there were 209,198 tourists from India the highest among various countries, followed by Russia with 209,146 and 187, 118 from China. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China topped the number of tourists the country was receiving and Muizzu wants China to restore that status. There has since been a sharp drop in the number of Indian tourists visiting the country and given how China weaponises tourism, the number from China is likely to go up sharply.
The Maldives moved away from India not only on the issue of the maintenance personnel of the helicopters. Shortly after raising that, Male decided against renewing a hydrographic survey MoU signed in 2019. Under this agreement, the Maldives National Defence Force and the Indian Navy carried out three joint hydrographic surveys to update navigational charts of the waters around the Maldives.
Later, in December 2023, Maldives declined to attend the Colombo Security Conclave summit held at Port Louis in Mauritius. The CSC, a meeting at the level of national security advisers (NSA) was itself a byproduct of the Maldives-India coast guard exercises since 1995 which was joined by Sri Lanka in 2011. In 2021, the CSC itself became a formal organisation with a secretariat in Colombo with Mauritius joining as a full member and Seychelles and Bangladesh as observers.
Any assessment of the future course in Maldives requires us to look back at the past decade which has seen the presidencies of Abdulla Yameen (17 November 2013–18) and Ibrahim Mohammed Solih (17 November 2018–2023).
The CSC, a meeting at the level of national security advisers (NSA) was itself a byproduct of the Maldives-India coast guard exercises since 1995 which was joined by Sri Lanka in 2011.
It was Yameen, Muizzu’s mentor, who took Maldives closer to China. In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the Maldives and welcomed the island-state into the BRI. Due to this, a number of infrastructure projects were financed through Chinese government loans. Prominent among these was the China-Maldives friendship bridge linking Malé with the Velana International Airport on Hulhule island and the expansion of the airport, both of which were funded by the EXIM Bank of China. In 2012, a contract for the airport project that had been given to an Indian company had been cancelled.
Another major project was the development of 2,500 housing units in different parts of the island. The Chinese government also gifted Maldives the Laamu link road that connects several southern islands.
In 2015, the Maldives passed a new law allowing foreigners to own land in the country if they invested more than US$ 1 million and more than 70 percent of the land was reclaimed from the sea. This was a prelude of sorts for the acquisition of the Feydhoo Finolhu island on a 50-year lease for US$ 4 million by a Chinese firm in 2016. This is located close to Hulhule island where the main airport is located. Another island in Kunaavashi Atoll has also been leased for 50 years to an investment company with Chinese connections.
At the time, there were also reports that the Chinese were planning to build port facilities on the Laamu Gaadhoo island in the southern part of the archipelago. During his presidential campaign, Muizzu had promised to build a trans-shipment harbour for the island.
The Maldives passed a new law allowing foreigners to own land in the country if they invested more than US$ 1 million and more than 70 percent of the land was reclaimed from the sea.
Now the Chinese State Construction Engineering Corporation has proposed building 15,000 housing units on an artificial island that will be reclaimed near Malé. During the China visit, the housing minister Ali Haidar said that there were plans for another 30,000 units on that island called Rasmalé with Chinese help and that this was among the agreements signed during the Muizzu visit to China.
So far India has taken a relaxed view of the developments in Maldives. In an interview with the local media last month, Muizzu struck a reconciliatory note saying that India will continue to be his country’s “closest ally” and has urged New Delhi to provide debt relief to his country in relation to the US$ 400.9 million that it owed India. He said that India had provided a lot of aid to the Maldives and had implemented the “greatest number of projects.” He said that the issue of the military personnel was the only contentious issue between the two countries.
New Delhi has now reconciled to the fact that the Chinese are going to be a factor in the Indian Ocean Region in the time to come. As far as Chinese naval activity goes, both the United States and India monitor the movements of its submarines, warships, and research vessels closely. As of now, there are no indications that the Chinese are planning to build any new naval facilities in the region. In any case, India is upgrading its military presence in the Lakshadweep islands. It has established a new naval facility INS Jatayu on Minicoy islands which is in addition to INS Dweeprakshak in Kavaratti, also in the island chain. The new base will be the closest Indian military facility to the Maldives.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation
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Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the ORF. He has been a journalist specialising on national and international politics and is a commentator and ...
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