Exclusive | President Muizzu is immature but even he can’t harm India-Maldives bond: Mariya Didi

Mariya Didi, the former defence minister of Maldives, was recently in New Delhi to attend the Firstpost Defence Summit. In an interview to Firstpost on the sidelines of the event, she spoke on various facets of the India-Maldives relations, the Muizzu government’s performance, Maldives’ relations with China, India’s strategic altruism and more. The following are excerpts from the interview. It has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

For a country that shares such a close bond with India, what lies behind this current antagonism?

The rhetoric lies behind this antagonism or the ‘supposed antagonism’. Parliamentary elections are just round the bend, and I think president (Mohamed) Muizzu thinks that there is an antagonism between the Maldivians and the Indians. Because of the rhetoric that they created saying that Maldives sovereignty is being lost and all that… (It has been) three months since he came into government, the Indian troops are still there. And there has been no threat to our sovereignty whatsoever by them being there. We have always assured the Maldivian public and everybody else that they are there on a purely humanitarian ground to help us in case, you know, somebody needs to be airlifted or whatever.

If a person is lost at sea, I mean originally also this came about because we used to ask India for help and you had to find a free helicopter or Dornier or something to help us find that person or airline. That took time. Because helicopters cannot just fly over to the Maldives. It has to be transported on a ship.

So, the solution for this at that time by the (previous) government was for the troops to be placed there for them to help us. They do not fly unless the MNDF (Maldives National Defence Forces) instructs them. The MNDF has to ask them for the helicopter to lift off the ground. Till today, because the MNDF hasn’t asked them to do anything that the helicopters are there, the Dornier is there, the (Indian) troops are there. Recently a Maldivian young boy was lost at sea, but president Muizzu refused to get the help of these professionals who had the professional equipment to help. Unfortunately, he died…

I hope such incidents do not happen in the future and I hope president Muizzu realizes that he shouldn’t be caught in his own rhetoric and that he should move on as a responsible member of the international community and let Maldives have its status which it had during our time in government.

Would you say then that the current rhetoric is largely due to political manoeuvring, or does it have its roots in the society?

When president (Abdulla) Yameen was in power, he went to the Supreme Court and got rid of many parliamentarians… It was very unconstitutional. We were regressing in our democracy… He didn’t like to be queried. He accused India of interfering in our national affairs. When our hard-earned democracy, our Constitution (under Yameen) was at risk, he wanted India to shut an eye to that. He got annoyed because his power is being eroded. He wanted to stay forever.

So, do you think that is where it is flowing from? Muizzu is walking in those footsteps?

Yeah… Muizzu being… I would say relatively new to politics. He has never been in Parliament. He’s just been a minister somewhere, an executive post and the only thing was he won a mayorship, but with very little votes. He was in the shadows of somebody else always… People were shouting at Yameen. Muizzu was an executive, so nobody really bothered about him. Muizzu must have thought that he won this elections on that (India bashing)…

He is now trying to consolidate it, but what actually is happening is that Maldivian economy is in a very bad state. Muizzu is overspending… He is very lavish with whatever he is doing. There’s a lot of unhappiness in the electorate and Muizzu is trying to find a way of deflecting it somewhere and trying to blame somebody else so that people don’t really see what is actually happening inside the country.

Maybe Muizzu thinks that China could be the benefactor even if relationship goes south with India?

I think Muizzu is slowly learning that that also doesn’t work… you might have strategic competition to a degree between India and China. But there is so much cooperation between India and China as well. So, Maldives…has to think whether China can really take over the burden that India does for us?

The Chinese are realists. Muizzu interprets the relationship with India as very transactional… But India sees us as partners. Sisters in the Indian Ocean. We work together. Take your external affairs minister, Jaishankar… he also said that India doesn’t see the Indian Ocean as an arena. India seeks to have partners with those in Indian Ocean so that we make it stable, secure, and free and open Indo-Pacific.

So that is that was going to be my follow-up question. India, as you said elsewhere, has been Maldives’s as 911 call. Both countries share civilisational ties. The language that we speak is tied within the Indic family. India is the first responder in any crisis. So, why would you put all this at risk? What is the thought process behind it?

It is immaturity. Three months in Muizzu realizes that he’s not getting anywhere. So, I see the Coast Guard has taken part in the Indian naval games (2024 Milan Exercise). I see the ‘Dosti’ exercises taking place right now as we speak in the Maldives. I see that… he is slowly realizing the realities of being a president. When you know become president, you don’t become president of the world. You have an obligation, no matter how big or small your country is. You have an obligation to work with others as partners and to rely on friends and allies. Even the US, even in if you call it a unipolar world, even then they were part of the NATO. BRICS, G20, BIMSTEC… Everybody is working together… that is how you assure the sovereignty of a country, you know, to make sure that you have the trust and friendship of your neighbors and friends.

My final question. Are you surprised that given the background of what has been happening between India and the Maldives of late, the Narendra Modi government has recently come out with an even higher budgetary allocation for Maldives (which now has increased to Rs 770 crore). How do you see this gesture?

Mahatma Gandhi said that an eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind and you’re following your philosophies. Even if a Maldives president was acting immature doesn’t mean that suddenly the whole of Indian politics should change. The way Muizzu is working it is very likely that our country also could go into a difficult situation, such as Sri Lanka. Even then India came to help. Even if Muizzu continues on this path… still India would go in to help its traditional friend, its close neighbour.

Your Prime Minister Modi said when he met (previous) president Ibrahim Mohammed Solih that India has a ‘neighbourhood first’ policy, but amongst the ‘neighborhood first’ policy, India sees ‘Maldives first’ as a very important partner. During our time in government, India presented us with the new Huravee (MCGS Huravee, a patrol vessel commissioned in 2016 and transferred to the Maldivian Coast Guard as MCGS Huravee in 2023). There were so many Maldivians being trained in your institutions, people from our MNDF and those bonds last forever.

I’ve seen so many Maldivians who have friends in the Indian army and you know, they’re like brothers, you know, they’ve slept in the same cantonment, work together, being classmates together. That sort of traditional bond… We eat rice and curry, you eat rice and curry too. We love Indian Bollywood movies. We love Hindi music. We come to India when we are unwell. All these luxury resorts are built on sand and gravel imported from India. These are not things that can be taken away by just one person or president Muizzu who comes for a five-year-term and whose honeymoon period, you know, has been the shortest lived.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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