In geographical terms, Maldives is a small country compared to most others. In terms of national sovereignty and the global strategic initiatives it signs into, the nation is no less than any other. Maybe, it is more strategically located than many others, as a result, Maldives’ relations with the larger Indian neighbour, especially in matters of defence and security, and the more recently achieved closure to the long-standing IMBL dispute with Mauritius in the South, have both become meat for the domestic political mill. They are so independent of the truth and logic behind the arguments that are proffered by political adversaries of incumbent President Ibrahim Solih. It makes it all the more personal and political than foreign and security policy issues, as they are being sought to be made out.
In this overall background, the irony was that Maldivian Vice President Faisal Naseem was urging for peace in the Indian Ocean at a conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, when the nation’s Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid was participating and also co-moderating a green energy round-table of the Indo-Pacific Ministerial Forum of the European Union (EU) at Stockholm, Sweden. If one agrees that the multiple Indo-Pacific initiatives at times working at cross-purposes is not only about altruist intentions to make the inherited world a better place for future generations but is also about making it more ‘secure’ (here there are differences in ideas and interpretations), then one will (have to) agree that the two Maldivian leaders may have been working at cross-purposes, all at once.
It does not stop with the Maldives. Neighbouring Sri Lanka’s Ports and Shipping Minister, Nimal Siripala de Silva, was at Dhaka, his choice indicating the nation’s priority just now, vis a vis the Indian Ocean. The nation’s Foreign Minister Ali Sabry was in Stockholm, chairing a round-table discussion on ‘Building more sustainable and inclusive prosperity together.’ It is indicative of the way and direction in which the world and the region, in particular, has travelled since the early sixties, when Sri Lanka was spearheading a campaign for declaring the Indian Ocean as a ‘zone of peace’. Only years later, in 1966, the US obtained Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in a controversial deal with an erstwhile British coloniser and converted it into a military base.
Positions, postures
India’s initiatives, positions and postures in the Indian Ocean on one hand and the Indo-Pacific on the other, lent greater direction and purpose. Delivering the keynote address at the Dhaka conference, for instance, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar declared that New Delhi was committed to the wellbeing of Indian Ocean nations. In the same vein, he added that the ‘Indo-Pacific is now a reality’. He did not clarify if he was just referring to Indo-Pacific as a new geographical marker or has invested it with what New Delhi has conceptualised along with the US, Japan and Australia.
There are reasons. One, India is a partner in both the US-initiated Indo-Pacific and Quad. Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen Anil Chauhan, participated in military commanders’ conference on the Indo-Pacific in the US with the UK. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was scheduled to be in Australia for a Quad summit later this month but it has been put off as US President Joe Biden is getting caught in debt-ceiling negotiations with the US Congress. However, Modi may continue with the scheduled bilateral with Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese.
A day earlier, on 22 May, he will be in Papua New Guinea in the neighbourhood, for the third India-Pacific Islands Cooperation Summit (India-Pacific summit). The forum brings together 14 Pacific islands, namely, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. En route, he would be there at the G7 summit in Japan.
All of it is fine, but then, some time ago, it was said that India did not want Quad to become a military alliance. In fact, when the US, the UK and Australia surprised the world with their AUKUS, a military alliance, one of the reasons given was that Quad could not take that road on India’s insistence. Yet, there was no knowing if India – and also Japan, the other Quad member – were adequately taken into confidence before the AUKUS came into being, as if out of the blue.
The question is the Quad constitutes the founding members of the Indo-Pacific, where membership is wide open. Rather, what distinguishes the two? Independent of both, India is again a member of the ‘independent’ Colombo Security Conclave (CSC) of regional nations, including of course, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Mauritius, with Seychelles and Bangladesh as observers (for the present). Whether or not India sees its multiple initiatives of the kind pointing to its greater interest in promoting the US-led Indo-Pacific, at least other nations in the region have come to believe that is after all the case.
French connection
In the overall context, the US-led Indo-Pacific triggered interests (and possible concerns) elsewhere and the EU came up with one of its own. They even had an introductory workshop in Colombo, before the mass protests in Sri Lanka that led to internal disturbances and regime change. Such instances, coupled with the continuing Ukraine War, may have delayed the EU initiative but not dampened its enthusiasm. That is a possible message from the recent Stockholm round-table. It’s not as if what it was about. Instead, it was about what it is now.
Yet, the EU plans are not without inherent hiccups. Old-world member nations like France and Germany are said to want to spread the forgotten European glory across the globe. They sorely feel the absence of their colonial glory though they may be willing to tailor and tune their ambitions to contemporary realities. Between them, Germany, at least before the Ukraine War, was seen as willing to play the second-fiddle to France, smitten as it is still by the 20th century past – the two Great Wars and their cumulative fallout on the nation and its overseas image, near and afar.
They, however, faced a problem as new members that they ushered into the EU without second thoughts seemed willingly yield to unsaid American pressure, of not toeing the line of these two in particular. After the commencement of the Ukraine War, there are perceptible differences in the approach and attitude of France and Germany. The latter wants oil from Russia but also wants to arm Ukraine to fight off Russia. France does not seem to care too much.
Yet, the common goal, which they seem to want to take up with the EU, maybe a little later, is to reach out to the larger Indo-Pacific region, where France has 24 island nations to call its own. There are another 20 French islands in the Atlantic, but that is immaterial just now. The French islands in the Indo-Pacific give the need and justification, and also concern and commitment, to reach out to the larger region, be it in political, economic or strategic terms.
France is not in alliance with the US in any of the American initiatives of the kind. But it has independent economic and security out-reaches with other nations in these regions. For instance, the militaries of France and India regularly exercise in and around French Reunion islands on the mouth of the Indian Ocean, not far away from America’s Diego Garcia military base and the adjoining waters of BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territory).
Hidden agenda
Yet, in the post-Cold War contemporary era, the ‘credit’ for ushering in the concept of Indo-Pacific, without calling it by that name, belongs to China. It had the ‘String of Pearls’ strategic encirclement of India in the immediate and extended Indian Ocean region, but through purported development cooperation initiatives. For now, China has the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka and has a radar station coming up at the land’s end, Dundra Point, both on 99-year-long leases.
China has since expanded it all in the name of ambitious/over-ambitious BRI, and at the same time has begun with a naval base in Djibouti. It is also eyeing properties in the Pacific, closer to the US mainland. The Covid hazard and more so, the bad name that China got as the source of the same, had come as a dampener, but Beijing is slowly but surely trying to shake them off with initiatives that would be packaged as developmental aid for a post-Covid revival of third world economies, but with a hidden strategic agenda, too.
There is another unlikely candidate in the race, but running parallel and not within the group or groups identified as the global Indo-Pacific contest. Russia has chosen the strategic route without using, selling or firing a weapon. In India’s neighbourhood, Russia has agreements with Bangladesh and now Myanmar for setting up nuclear power plants. In fact, India is the third partner in Bangladesh, in charge of civil construction and the like, while the nuclear plant and nuclear fuel come from Russia. Right now, Russia is expanding its nuclear power-based strategic outreach to the rest of South-East Asia, and has agreements with a few nations in the region.
Waiting time
In this background, the question arises, “Which Indo-Pacific are you talking about?” Barring China, India fits into all combos barring one-on-one with all others. Even with China, though in Indo-Pacific proper, India is a partner in BRICS and the reigning chair of SCO, albeit in the company of a friendly Russia. It is too early to speculate if China’s BRI and Russia’s below-the-radar Indo-Pacific would meet somewhere, someday.
It is clearer in the case of India’s friends from the West, granting the ideological divide between this larger grouping and the supposedly left-leaning combo-less combo of China and Russia, India is a founding partner in the US-led Indo-Pacific and Quad, but has not stated its approach towards the EU-centric Indo-Pacific. With the EU, India’s initiatives and partnerships are on the bilateral plane, either with individual nations or the EU as a grouping, but not with the EU as a defence and security-centric entity. That is also because, despite several attempts, the EU refuses to evolve into a defence entity along with its substantial institutional presence on the political and economic fronts. Here too, India and the EU are struggling to negotiate an FTA for years now. Owing to internal dynamics that has pitted numbers against original goals, the EU is unable to come up with a cohesive defence and security policy approach to support the fairly well-defined foreign policy objective of the grouping.
Until they make it work together as a powerful engine, the EU’s political focus viz India or other third nations will have to be confined to a soft power approach to such esoteric ideas as human rights. When they develop that invisible yet collective strategic muscle in and for the external world, say, in the Indo-Pacific, then like the US before it, the EU too would make human rights, ecology and environment, subservient to its overall strategic policy.
That is to say, like ‘my terrorist and your terrorist’, you will then have ‘my violator and your violator’. But unlike in the case of the US, the EU will have to think as one body and not as a group of nations with different perceptions and priorities. India can wait until then to make its choice, unless it is as altruist as believed in matters of keeping Indo-Pacific and Quad, non-military groupings, with similar or at least near-similar purposes and goals.
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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