National/Regional/International Affairs
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
-George Bernard Shaw.
By N. P. Upadhyaya (Aryal)
Kathmandu: Al Jazeera on March 12, 2024, states that “with a heavy heart” India has begun withdrawing military personnel operating surveillance aircraft in the Maldives after the new President Ahmed Muizzu had ordered them to leave.
Quoting the newspaper of March second week, Al Jazeera continues to say that Mihaaru (local newspaper) reported that 25 Indian soldiers deployed in the southernmost atoll of Addu had left the archipelago as part of a withdrawal deal between the two countries. India yields. A rare case indeed.
This means that if given courage and determination, India can be easily overcome and that when it comes to nations, even elephantine India in the immediate neighborhood and a tiny nation, Maldives, are two equal sovereign nations, and this has best been proven by President Muizzu.
To recall, Indian military men intentionally stationed in Nepal’s western borders in the early 1950s had to vacate the Nepali soil for good when the then Nepali prime minister Kirtinidhi Bista under the backing of sitting King Mahendra its military check posts in the early seventies.
After Nepal, the same forceful orders, or stern warnings, were served on India by Sri Lanka’s President Premdasa, who was the third President of Sri Lanka from January 2, 1989, to his assassination in 1993.
Premdasa dared to announce there can’t be an annual SAARC Summit on Sri Lankan soil until and unless the foreign forces (implied the Indian peacekeeping forces, IPKF).
The resultant effect was India had to take back its military forces from Colombo to Delhi as commanded by President Premdasa.
President Muizzu had convincingly assured his voters in last year’s election that, if and when he gets elected to the post of Maldivian President, he will force India to take back its unwanted Military personnel from the Maldives.
An old news article as of February 2024, prepared by Reuters had maintained that “India will remove its troops in the Maldives by May 2024, the Maldivian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday, as the two countries seek agreement on a pullout that has strained ties.
The roughly 80 soldiers stationed in the Indian Ocean archipelago will be replaced by civilians, officials from both countries said.
India, at the heart of the vast region, has long been its most powerful economic and military force. Still, China, to the chagrin of neighboring India, has made significant inroads with its much larger financial resources, signing infrastructure deals and securing access to ports in countries surrounding India.
India has received several setbacks in South Asian nations of late yet it claims, that “countries in the region have an intense love for India”. The opposite is true.
The split personality who is India’s Foreign Minister said that many countries in the region of late have changed their hearts on India which is not the fact.
In fact, it is the bullying, coercion and highhandedness of India that the smaller nations find it difficult to adjust their ties with India and out of frustration they submit to Indian dictates to which India gives a name of “pouring in love and honor for India.
India’s bullying acts frustrated Maldives to the hilt which prompted President Muizzu to take a firm decision on Nepal upon victory at the election held last year.
In the meantime, the world-recognized and the declared India hand, former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih without fearing the exposure of his India bend, appealed to the sitting President Muizzu to engage in dialogue with neighboring countries to tackle the nation’s financial challenges, The Mint says dated March 25, 2024.
Solih said that India must be approached once again to deal with the current financial crunch.
To recall, it was Ibrahim Solih’s excessive India leaning that got defeated by Muizzu in the election held last year.
In a grand departure from the Indian trend, one political animal adjudged as “Pro-India” for the first time has been defeated in the present-day South Asian politics which is tentatively governed by PM Modi or by his proxies manufactured by India in those respective countries save Pakistan.
Pakistan is the single country in the SA region to have been kept detached or shielded by the ill-interests of the neighboring Indian regime or else the smaller countries voluntarily submit to the Indian dictates. If not then the RAW men like R. K. Yadav right being inside Kathmandu recently threatened any Nepali who is found anti-India shall surely be killed by what he admitted “our men”.
Why China is honored instead of India:
This explains India’s cold-blooded heart and yet expects that the neighboring population should worship the born scoundrel. And this repels neighboring countries to make a visible shift towards China as the last recourse. Thus China is lucky to have gained immensely out of continued India follies. Thus India’s loss is automatically China’s gain.
The South Asians’ slow but sure attraction is interpreted by India and its media as China weaving a trap.
The Indians have coined an elusive “debt trap” theory against China and the fact is that the entire Western World is under the Indian “disinformation trap”.
Some time ago, it was in the news that in Europe, there exists a “disinformation factory lab” which was meant to disseminate false information about the countries with whom India is “unfriendly”.
I recall that one Pakistani military official some two years ago exposed India’s dis-info lab which was later submitted to the perusal of the UN Body for general consumption.
So let’s understand that President Muizzu’s tilt towards China is his compulsion, not a choice. Other countries too may have felt the brunt and shifted towards China and that too willingly.
If other leaders of South Asia do so then it is India’s non-stop bullying which pushes the respective countries to inch towards China. That’s it. No trap has the best to be understood by the Western World including the USA.
And yet Indian PM Modi claims that he has transformed India into a Ram Rajya, a divine state which it is not.
After January 22, 2024, even in Ayodhya, can India forcefully claim that it has changed its hearts for the better? Ask the immediate neighbors? Aggressive tone instead has trebled. Criminal brains live longer.
Muizzu’s stern warning to India:
For the ETV Bharat dated March 05, 2024, Aroonim Bhuyan writes, “Though an agreement was reached between India and the Maldives to replace Indian military personnel posted in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation with civilian personnel, Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu has made a fresh assertion that “Indian troops” would not be allowed to stay even in civilian clothing”.
All praise to President Muizzu.
In a fit of rage, President Muizzu said that ‘there will be no Indian troops in the country come May 10”.
But India will not be easy to tame with, the Nepali experience is.
Even from Uganda, FM Jay Shankar ran his defecto regime in Kathmandu. Shankar-PM Dahal meeting catapulted the entire Nepali politics.
Yet another local website quoted Muizzu as saying while addressing a residential community at Baa Atoll Eydhafushi in early March “Not in uniform and not in civilian clothing. The Indian military will not be residing in this country in any form of clothing. I state this with confidence.”
Muizzu had won last year’s presidential election on an exposing India plank.
International media outlets report that he ran an ‘India Out’ crusade in which he called for the withdrawal of some Indian military personnel present in his country for operating two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft. These Indian personnel, numbering less than 100, are primarily involved in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief work in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation. India enters like a rat and emerges as an elephant.
However, Muizzu, during his election campaign, claimed that over 1,000 Indian military personnel were posted in the Maldives and they posed a threat to the sovereignty of the country. After assuming office in November last year, Muizzu made a formal request to India to withdraw these personnel.
In the meanwhile, a new politico-security development Meanwhile, even as Muizzu asserted that “Indian troops” would not be allowed to stay in his country even in civilian clothing, in a related development, the Maldives signed a defence cooperation agreement with China, writes ETV march 5, 2024, that as part of the deal, China will offer free defence assistance to the Maldives. The agreement was signed by Maldives Defence Minister Mohamed Ghassan Maumoon and Major General Zhang Baoqun, Deputy Director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China.
This means Maldive’s President now has made up his mind in a determined manner that come what may, he will not settle for less with coercive India.
Gunjan Sing for the Quint writes, dated March 25, 2024, that what was visibly painful for India was the Maldives, which has once again announced the discontinuation of the agreement to undertake a hydrographic survey with India.
President Muizzu declared that the government is currently reviewing around 100 projects signed with India and that there will be a complete withdrawal of Indian military personnel from Maldives by 10 May.
If India is at the losing end in South Asia perpetually, then conversely, at the receiving end is China for distancing itself with coercive practices a la India for exhibiting “bullying the countries in India’s neighborhood.
So aptly wrote China Daily “Ironically, India is behaving like a bully. India is boycotting the Maldives in a big way, with Indian travel agencies cancelling trips to the Maldives”
This transformed India in the new dressing on January 22, 2024!
India shall never change.
In yet another article, China Daily asserted that “India is a big country that has traditionally friendly relations with the Maldives. It should respect the sovereignty of its neighbor.
The China Daily advises India saying that ‘Chauvinism and a big brother attitude will only further worsen relations between the two countries, and the stability of the region’.
Media reports reveal that Muizzu’s ‘India Out’ platform was first championed by former Maldivian president Abdulla Yameen, which was in response to Ibrahim Solih’s ‘India First’ policy.
The Maldivian opposition has campaigned vigorously for the ousting of Indian military personnel from the island, a campaign at a time when the Indian military’s evacuation plan had, to recall, been threatening Maldivian sovereignty.
Male-Islamabad ties:
In what could be taken as an old move, both Male and Islamabad ties, though remained almost unnoticed in most of the South Asian nations, both Male and Islamabad had entered into a capacity-building agreement in the power sector of Pakistan, reported a Time Of India News dated July 07, 2016.
The sneaking of Pakistan into Maldivian affairs as back as 2018, albeit with the due invitation, adds a different twist and new flavor to the India-dominated South Asian politics which brings once again India and Pakistan face to face each other.
In a fresh political development yet pinching in China-Maldivian ties, China has sent 1,500 tonnes of drinking water, March 30, 2024, to the Maldives in a move that signals the Indian Ocean Islands continued to shift towards Beijing. As an island nation dominated by sand beds, the Maldives consistently faces water shortages. In the past, the country has depended on its closest neighbor as of now – India – to fulfil its water requirements. In 2014, India.
If Indian media were to be believed then what also needs to be taken for granted is that together with some smaller South Asian nation, Nepal too is loitering around its Northern neighbor.
The Indian assumption stems from Nepal’s Indian hand Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha has left Nepal for almost ten good days to China as if he is to be indoctrinated by the Chinese style of Communism.
However, the Maoists hate China like anything but only use the Chinese for gold smuggling.
Ultimately, every Nepal Maoist leader is the brain-child of the RAW, the Indian intelligence agency.
The RAW invented the name Maoists only to shift the suspicion to China as Mao-Tse-Tung was the Chairman of China.
Yet another insulting twist:
Given the entire Indian hegemony in Maldivian politics, a highly objectionable insulting story has come out in recent days
It speaks of how the Indian men posted in the High Commission in Male more often than not poked their sharp noses into the internal matters of Maldivian internal affairs.
And the one who says so is none less than the sitting President itself. “President Mohamed Muizzu said in an interview that his predecessor Ibrahim Mohamed Solih operated on orders from “a foreign ambassador.”
A time was when Indian envoys ruled and dictated Nepali affairs.
Talking to Public Service Media (PSM) and responding to a question about the opposition’s criticism regarding the recent procurement of military drones, Muizzu said that the main opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), also held a supermajority in Parliament when it was in power from 2018 to 2023.
In recent days and weeks, Maldives has been inching close to Turkey and in the process has acquired surveillance drones from Turkey for patrolling its vast exclusive economic zone, according to recent media reports.
Needless to say, Turkey and Pakistan are “my dear friends”. The Turkish President on several occasions fought with India on the “India Occupied Kashmir issue. That’s all.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
Login to add a comment