India must rethink its neighbourhood policy

All the smaller countries around us who have been the generous recipients of our aid have failed to honour our crucial security concerns vis-a-vis China.

In an exhibition of misplaced, crude and delusionary machismo and in terminology that smacks of street-side slang rather than diplomatic parley, President Mohamed Muizzu of the Maldives on his return from China angrily remarked: “We may be small but that doesn’t give you the licence to bully us.”

However, this David and Goliath scenario that President Muizzu presents has a mammoth-sized flaw. In this case, it is David who has raked up the fight and is deceptively shifting the blame onto India to gain sympathy by faking victimhood.

Let us recapitulate the sequence of events of the current India-Maldives spat to remind President Muizzu where the fault lies. A harmless, innocent picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi strolling along the pristine beach of the Indian island of Lakshadweep resulted in three junior ministers of his government indulging in a barrage of profanities ridiculing our PM as a “clown” and referring to our country as “cowdung.”

Maldives, known globally as an exotic holiday destination, is an archipelago of around 1,200 islands located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of mainland India. Close to the Maldives, about 750 km away lie the Indian island of Lakshadweep, a smaller group of islands that share the same ecosystem as the Maldives—similar beaches, fauna and flora. In PM Modi’s sojourn in Lakshadweep, the Maldivians saw a red flag: an attempt to promote Lakshadweep as a competition to the Maldives, hence the uncouth backlash.