India largely ignored a recent news story stating that a Chinese research vessel was scheduled to make a third port call in the Maldives this year. Given India’s growing security worries with China, a “research vessel” that can conduct underwater study for mineral reserves and do satellite searches is equivalent to a “spy ship”.
Regarding a different “China-related” development in the neighborhood, the same Indian quiet is not possible. After clarifying that no decision had been made to lift the one-year prohibition on all foreign research vessels when it was supposed to expire on January 1, 2025, as previously claimed by a Japanese media article, the commotion subsided.
The minister stated, “At the end of the year, we will evaluate the situation and decide whether to continue the moratorium or lift it.”
Although it would play a role, he made no mention of the next presidential election in Sri Lanka, where the “permanent bureaucracy” also has a voice in questions of security policy.
What was important in the brief speech was Minister Sabry’s explanation that Colombo cannot discriminate against countries while approving research projects in the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which Sri Lanka was a signatory.
Remarkably, observers in Sri Lanka saw an Indian hand in addition to the US’s in Colombo’s ban, which they understood to be directed against Chinese ships that had recently been making port visits to the country at least once a year.
When Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited China, neighborhood experts witnessed an equally hasty response from their colleagues. When Hasina abruptly ended her visit, citing her daughter’s illness, they appeared relieved. The broad consensus was that the prime minister needed to step in quickly to restore order since the nationwide student anti-quota protests demanded an immediate fix.
Hasina’s early return, according to anti-China pundits in India, was caused by disagreements with her hosts over strategic issues and/or the type of development support Beijing was anticipated to provide. They said that she gave her hosts a “diplomatic snub.” They easily overlooked the fact that Hasina’s team had inked 20 agreements with China prior to departing for Dhaka, which in turn guaranteed $133 million in development support.
Expectations in India
When it comes to problems that solely affect New Delhi’s security, are the expectations of the strategic community and the Indian public reasonable in what they demand from the country’s immediate neighbors, particularly China?
Second, should they try to sway Indian officials on issues that directly affect them by lobbying the government to adopt that perspective alone, or should they use a supporting media to project popular opinion as a viable choice for policy?
Nothing summed it up better than the much-publicized ‘Boycott Maldives’ call on Indian social media, which was spurred on by three junior ministers in President Mohamed Muizzu’s administration who disparaged and criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India over the latter’s visit to Lakshadweep. It quickly became apparent that the Maldivian ministers lacked motivation and were ignorant, but by then, the Indian side had also done more harm than good. Their immediate “suspension” made sure that the discussion was significantly subdued before it entered the public sphere.
Large segments of the Maldivian populace, who had previously supported India and held the country in higher regard than some sections of their fellow citizens when it came to political behavior, administrative choices, and social behavior, felt betrayed, if not outright cheated. They have been getting their daily fix of India from the various Indian TV news stations for the last couple of decades and more. They now have even greater respect for India after the changes.
That applies to all of India’s neighbors in South Asia. Regarding the typical Indian’s knowledge and curiosity about any or all of their neighbors’ societies, politics, and policies, the same cannot be stated. The demand to “boycott Maldives,” which may have been the first of its sort in Indian public criticism of a neighbor other than Pakistan, the country’s longtime foe, raised eyebrows among policy experts and the general public in other South Asian countries as well.
India adopts people-centric policies
However, India’s neighborhood strategies have been “people-centric, not personality-driven” in the bilateral context practically from the beginning. Indian operations, from the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in 1983, were impacted by the UN General Assembly’s (UNGA) resolution on “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) several decades later. The “Neighbourhood First” strategy of Prime Minister Modi gave it greater definition and polish.
During the peak of the anti-government “Aragalaya” mass protests in Sri Lanka, for example, Indian officials, including External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar, emphasized that New Delhi’s decision to expedite food, fuel, and funds—among other necessities for a beleaguered economy and suffering populace—came solely from this ideology. Jaishankar’s recurrent phrase, “We stand by the Sri Lankan people,” was perceived by Sri Lankans as a “loaded statement.”
With the exception of the incarcerated former president Abdulla Yameen’s “India Out” campaign, which gained traction after he lost his election in 2018, there haven’t been any examples of anti-India statements or demonstrations of this magnitude in the Maldives or any of the other neighboring countries in recent years. Indians should wait before drawing conclusions on whether the current president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, is truly “anti-Indian” or whether just his foreign policy goals need to be adjusted to better reflect the situation on the ground.
The vast majority of “middle-of-the-road” Maldivians, who are eager for “India in,” also voted for Muizzu’s ruling People’s National Congress (PNC), giving him a “super-majority” in this year’s parliamentary elections. As such, they have a significant stake in the stability of his support base.
Yameen’s Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM), on the other hand, was soundly defeated, suggesting that most Maldivians did not support his brand of “peripheral politics.” After a while, Muizzu’s takeover of Yameen’s “conservative vote-bank” and subsequent removal of the country’s longest-serving President, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, had little bearing on the nation’s foreign policy, particularly with India. It is not necessary for Indian street opinion to get all worked up over it and try to reframe the country’s foreign policy through their social media
On the other hand, any bilateral concerns that exist between India and its neighbors on a governmental level have been resolved through diplomatic channels. One of the most recent is the manner in which India’s “Kachchatheevu issue” domestic political dispute was handled by Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Ali Sabry. After the matter turned into a domestic political one during the recent legislative elections in India, Sabry stated that there was “no need for talks with India” and that New Delhi had not brought it up with Colombo. Although the primary fishermen’s conflict has not yet been settled, there are government channels available to talk about the way forward and deal with the unfavorable consequences.
Strategic concerns
China is woven into the narrative of the strategic community of India’s worries about specific neighbors. It used to be Pakistan or the US during the Cold War. Sino-Pak cooperation, in contrast, isn’t receiving as much praise as it formerly did. It might be the result of Pakistan’s disastrous internal politics, which have also fueled the greatest economic catastrophe the country has ever experienced.
India’s security concerns were and still are at the center of everything, even the US-Indian relations from the “Cold War.” Such worries were and still are. However, the question remains as to whether Indians could push their “security concerns” on China at this time, as well as on the US and Pakistan in the past, and expect their neighbors to take those concerns seriously and respond appropriately. In fact, these neighbors do not perceive any military or geostrategic threat from those other countries. Their limited worries, if any, are focused on India, and as a matter of political survival closer to home, fringe anti-Indian forces continue to raise dust over them on a regular basis.
The Indian strategic community needs to touch and feel that for smaller nations anywhere, their sovereignty is their major self-defence mechanism as far as international fora and discourse go. It is no different in the Indian neighbourhood. Those nations, especially their strategic community and policy-makers tend to see Indian demands on them over issues that are not of immediate security concerns for them as interfering and impeding their nation’s sovereign decisions.
As is frequently noted, New Delhi, for its part, has rarely consulted its neighbors before making military agreements with outside parties, particularly extra-regional countries, much less taken them into confidence. This was the case a few weeks before the 1971 Bangladesh War began when India and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.
This was the case when New Delhi reversed course and started to ink defense deals with the US starting in 2005. Such pacts with the one-time global adversary of India have only been going from strength to strength over the past two decades, whichever party has been in power in New Delhi or whoever is the Prime Minister.
The brief pre-Galwan (2020) amity between China and India is also mentioned, beginning with the two unofficial summits held in Wuhan (2018) and Mahabalipuram (2019). Analysts focused on the neighborhood point out that their countries were unaware of the circumstances surrounding the two meetings, the outcomes, or the reason the two powerful South Asian countries were implicated in the Galwan massacres only a short time later.
Similarly, local observers remember how Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee conducted the well-known “Lahore bus diplomacy” in 2019 amid rising tensions between the two countries, how current Prime Minister Modi unexpectedly flew in to meet Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his birthday, and how the late President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan took part in the “Agra summit” (2021). However, the “Kargil War” also broke out in 1999, and this time around there were “Surgical Strikes” in 2016 in response to the “Uri terror-attack” in 2019.
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Geostrategic policies
India’s relations with China and Pakistan are erratic. Long-term, that was/is the case with the US as well, these strategic analysts surmise. They claim that when relations between New Delhi and Pakistan/China are tense, their Indian colleagues want their countries and governments to be aware of Indian security concerns, but they do not advise them on what to do when the other two are having constructive-sounding conversations.
They note that as recently as July 2024, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met twice in the same month, during which the leaders urged a “purpose and urgency” resolution to the four-year standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
During the “Kargil War Anniversary,” Prime Minister Modi said that Pakistan would learn a lesson. There were sufficient justifications because Pakistan-centric terrorism has made a comeback to the unstable border state of Jammu & Kashmir, despite recent significant progress in maintaining law and order. They ask: “Does India want us to play along if and when the yo-yo goes up, and expect our nations to antagonize Pakistan or China or anybody, if New Delhi’s ties with them become strained and difficult? Then, what should we make of the nation-states’ innately sovereign foreign and security policies?
Analysts from the neighbourhood are fed up with remembering that, even after defense and security agreements with non-regional powers like the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, New Delhi never notified or consulted them, even after the fact.
However, it appears that they become offended if our governments make business decisions that might have a security component, but solely from India’s standpoint. Since New Delhi is the only regional power and we cannot disregard its worries—which, at some point, become concerns for the entire region—our governments have been known to brief it into confidence when asked. They oppose “strategic autonomy,” which was a contentious issue in India when New Delhi, for example, refused to submit to the US-led West’s sanctions and imported Russian oil.
However, the government of India has legitimate concerns, and the country’s strategic community needs to follow suit. The “Colombo Security Conclave” (CSC) of Indian Ocean nations is a nascent effort to address shared concerns without expecting each member to concentrate on their own. These countries need to work together more often than they now do to resolve some bumps in the road.
They may eventually need to think about going beyond the original mandate, which was primarily focused on issues like oil leaks in shared waters, and extending it to include contemporary threats like cyberattacks, financial crimes, and drug threats in addition to the current CSC mandate, which is limited to “non-traditional security” concerns. That is also where the future is, as the CSC may serve as a platform for them to initially establish a stronger degree of mutual trust, reliability, and confidence, thereby mostly excluding non-regional countries.
