India-Maldives Relations (PSIR Optional)

The Maldives has about 520,000 people, no army worth the name, and a landmass smaller than a mid-sized Indian city — and yet no bilateral relationship in South Asia swings as violently. Every Maldivian presidential election since 2008 has moved the country’s India policy, sometimes by 180 degrees, and each swing has been read in New Delhi as a verdict on Indian influence. The more useful reading is structural: the pendulum is a property of the Maldivian political system, not a series of betrayals.

Why a state of half a million people sits at the centre of India’s maritime calculus

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• The Maldives is strategically weighty for reasons that have nothing to do with its size — it is a chain of about 1,192 islands strung across roughly 900 kilometres of ocean, sitting directly on the busiest east–west sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.
  • The bulk of India’s energy imports and a large share of its external trade transit the waters the archipelago commands, moving between the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Oman in the west and the Strait of Malacca in the east.
  • The archipelago straddles two of the Indian Ocean’s principal navigational gates: the Eight Degree Channel, between Minicoy and the Maldives, and the One and a Half Degree Channel through the southern atolls.
  • Whoever has surveillance and basing access across those channels can monitor — and in a crisis complicate — the sea lines on which India’s economy runs. That, and not Maldivian capability, is what makes the country a first-order Indian interest.
• Proximity is the second fact. The northernmost Maldivian atoll lies about 70 nautical miles from Minicoy, the southernmost island of Lakshadweep, and roughly 300 nautical miles from India’s western seaboard.
  • This is not a distant partnership managed at arm’s length; it is an extension of India’s own island geography, which is why Indian planners treat Maldivian airspace, waters and internal politics as adjacent rather than foreign.
  • Happymon Jacob’s argument that India’s excessive continental focus since independence has yielded poor returns — and that the grand-strategic centre of gravity must shift to the maritime sphere — finds its clearest small-state test case here.
• India’s presence in the Maldives is human and economic before it is strategic.
  • Roughly 30,000 Indian nationals live and work in the country on the External Affairs Ministry’s current count — teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, hospitality and construction workers — a community that is disproportionately visible because it staffs the schools and hospitals ordinary Maldivians use.
  • Indian companies hold significant stakes in construction, tourism infrastructure, aviation services and retail, and Indian firms have built or renovated much of the country’s public health and education plant.
  • India is the Maldives’ second-largest trading partner, with two-way trade of about US$772 million in 2025–26, a rise of over 13% year on year — Indian exports of about US$459 million against imports of about US$313 million.
• India has been the largest single source market for Maldivian tourism in most years since 2020, which converts a diplomatic quarrel into an immediate fiscal problem for Malé — a mechanism the 2024 boycott demonstrated with unusual clarity.

Minicoy, the median line and the 1982 episode

• The India–Maldives–Sri Lanka Maritime Agreement of 1976 delimited the three states’ maritime jurisdictions on the median line principle, and is the reason the relationship carries no live boundary dispute.
  • The agreement placed Minicoy unambiguously on the Indian side of the boundary, closing off the one issue that could have poisoned the relationship at its founding.
  • The wider doctrine of maritime delimitation in South Asia is treated with the region’s border disputes; what matters here is the bilateral fact — an early, clean, uncontested settlement, achieved before either state had reason to quarrel.
• A minor episode in July 1982 is the only thing resembling a territorial irritant, and it is instructive precisely because it was defused rather than escalated.
  • Remarks by a senior Maldivian figure invoking cultural and linguistic affinity with Minicoy — whose people speak Mahl, a dialect of Dhivehi — were read in India as the germ of a claim.
  • Malé clarified within days that it was speaking of cultural resemblance and asserted no political claim whatsoever. The matter closed there and has never been revived by any Maldivian government, including the most anti-India ones.
  • The episode’s real lesson is about how small the Maldivian claim repertoire is: unlike Nepal or Pakistan, Malé has no territorial grievance to mobilise, so anti-India politics has had to be built on presence and sovereignty instead.

The mechanism: why Maldivian domestic politics rewrites its India policy

The distinctive analytical question in this relationship is not “why did Malé tilt to China?” but “why does a state this small produce swings this large?” The answer lies in four interlocking features of the Maldivian political system, none of which India can alter and all of which it must plan around.

A winner-takes-all presidency in a very small elite

• The 1968 republican constitution and its 2008 successor both vest executive power in a directly elected president who appoints the cabinet, controls the security services and drives foreign policy with minimal institutional check.
  • A two-round presidential election means the winner needs an absolute majority, which forces coalition-building before the second round and rewards the mobilisation of a single, emotive national issue.
  • Muizzu won the runoff of 30 September 2023 with about 54% against Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s 46%, on a turnout of over 87% — a genuine mandate, delivered on a foreign-policy slogan.
• The political elite is tiny and intensely personalised — a few dozen families, repeated defections, and parties that function as vehicles for individuals rather than as programmatic organisations.
  • Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Mohamed Nasheed, Abdulla Yameen (Gayoom’s half-brother) and Mohamed Waheed Hassan have all been allies and enemies of each other in different configurations.
  • Because parties are weakly institutionalised, there is no bureaucratic or party-organisational ballast to keep a new president’s foreign policy continuous with his predecessor’s.
• The People’s Majlis amplifies rather than moderates the swing, because presidential and parliamentary majorities usually align shortly after a presidential turnover.
  • Muizzu’s People’s National Congress won 70 of 93 seats in the parliamentary election of 21 April 2024, converting a narrow presidential win into near-total control of the legislature within six months.
  • The same pattern operated for Nasheed’s opponents after 2009 and for Solih’s Maldivian Democratic Party after 2019 — each time, a single actor came to control both branches and could reverse the previous line wholesale.

An economy with one engine and no fallback

• Tourism generates roughly a quarter of GDP directly and the large majority indirectly, through transport, construction, retail and the tax base — and there is almost no other tradable sector besides fisheries.
  • The country imports nearly all its food, fuel and medicine, and its construction material, much of it from or through India, which makes external supply an existential rather than a commercial question.
  • Dollar earnings come from tourists and dollar obligations come due on a fixed schedule, so any interruption to arrivals translates directly into a foreign-exchange crisis.
• The debt position removes most of Malé’s room for manoeuvre.
  • Public debt reached about 130% of GDP at end-2025, with the government reporting a reduction to about 121% by April 2026 after repaying roughly US$1.29 billion over two and a half years.
  • Usable foreign reserves have run between roughly US$148 million and US$244 million in mid-2026 — well under two months of imports — even after gross official reserves recovered to about US$718 million in April.
  • Malé cleared a US$500 million sukuk in April 2026 and avoided sovereign default, but did so by very nearly exhausting the Sovereign Development Fund. The IMF’s June 2026 assessment kept the Maldives at high risk of debt distress.
• The consequence for foreign policy is decisive: whoever can roll over Maldivian paper, swap currency and defer repayment holds real leverage, and India is the only partner that has consistently done all three at short notice.

The Islamist-nationalist current that makes “India” usable

• The Maldives is constitutionally an entirely Muslim state — citizenship is restricted to Sunni Muslims and the constitution bars any law contrary to Islam — which gives religious identity a formal place in politics that it does not have elsewhere in South Asia.
  • The displacement of the traditional Shafi’i practice by Saudi-funded Salafism since the 1980s, together with Pakistani madrassa influence, produced a religious-nationalist constituency that is small but electorally decisive in a country of this size.
  • Yameen’s 2013 campaign pledge to defend Sunni Islam and the 2023 “India Out” campaign’s framing of Indian personnel as an affront to sovereignty draw on the same current.
• “India” is a low-cost, high-return electoral symbol in this system, for reasons that have little to do with India’s actual conduct.
  • It is visible — Indian doctors, teachers, aircraft and, until 2024, uniformed personnel were physically present in a way Chinese lending is not.
  • It is safe — attacking India costs nothing internationally, whereas attacking China would risk the credit line.
  • It is unifying — sovereignty against a large neighbour is the one theme that can bind a fragmented opposition, which is exactly what “India Out” did for Muizzu’s coalition in 2023.
• The mirror image is that anti-India rhetoric is cheap in opposition and expensive in office, because the imports, the medical evacuations, the tourists and the treasury-bill rollovers are all Indian. Every Maldivian president who has campaigned against India has moderated in power.

Asymmetry: India as a domestic actor whether or not it acts

• The structural condition of South Asia is that India shares a boundary with every other state and no other state borders more than two — an asymmetry without parallel in any other region.
  • The consequence for small neighbours is that every domestic political question acquires an India dimension, so India becomes a factor in their internal politics whether or not it intervenes.
  • Hedging — cultivating China, and increasingly Turkey and the Gulf — is the standard response, because it creates bargaining room against a neighbour that cannot be balanced militarily.
• For India the corollary is that a dominant state cannot be a neutral one. What New Delhi regards as assistance may be experienced as intrusion, and Indian restraint may be read as neglect.
  • The Gujral Doctrine’s principle of non-reciprocity toward smaller neighbours was an attempt to answer exactly this problem, restated in the Neighbourhood First policy from 2014.
  • Robert Putnam’s two-level game is the cleanest way to state the mechanism: a Maldivian president negotiates simultaneously with New Delhi and with his own win-set, and when the domestic win-set narrows, the international bargain has to be broken publicly.
• Ayesha Jalal’s comparative point about South Asia — that regime trajectories are explained by the institutional balance between parties and the state apparatus, not by culture — applies in a small-state variant here: the Maldives has competitive elections without institutionalised parties, and it is that combination, not Islam and not Chinese money, that produces the swing.

The pendulum is not a measure of Indian failure; it is the output of a political system that converts every presidential election into a referendum on the neighbour.

The foundations, 1965–1988

• The Maldives became independent of Britain on 26 July 1965, and India was among the first states to recognise it — a fact both governments have used ever since as the anchor of the relationship’s legitimacy.
  • India established its mission in Malé in 1972 and appointed a resident High Commissioner in 1980; the Maldives opened a full High Commission in New Delhi only in November 2004, which is itself a measure of the asymmetry in diplomatic capacity.
  • 2025–26 has been marked on both sides as the sixtieth year of diplomatic relations, and the anniversary has been the organising frame for every major bilateral event since Modi’s Malé visit of July 2025.
• The early substance of the relationship was educational, financial and technical rather than strategic, and this is why it survived the political turbulence that followed.
  • Maldivian students came to India in numbers under the Colombo Plan from the 1960s, creating a generation of officials and professionals educated in India — including several who later led both pro-India and anti-India governments.
  • A State Bank of India branch opened in Malé in 1974, and remains a significant channel of trade finance and treasury-bill subscription to this day.
  • Regular air services began in 1975, and the two countries agreed to do away with visa requirements for each other’s nationals — an arrangement no other pair of South Asian states outside the Nepal and Bhutan cases has matched.
• The modernisation and extension of the runway at Hulhulé — the island airport serving Malé — was won by the International Airport Authority of India in an international competition in 1978 and completed in 1981.
  • The project matters symbolically because the Maldives’ entire tourism economy depends on that runway, and India built it before China had any presence in the country at all.
  • It also establishes the pattern of Indian assistance that has proved most durable: infrastructure that Maldivians use daily, delivered without a security condition attached.
• India has since supplied technical assistance on request across health, education, policing, meteorology, hydrography and civil administration, a low-visibility layer of the relationship that has continued through every political crisis.

Operation Cactus, 3 November 1988

This is the single most important event in the relationship and the strongest available evidence for India as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean. It is also, on the analytical point the standard accounts miss, the strongest evidence for Indian restraint.

The coup

• On the night of 3 November 1988, a force of between 100 and 200 mercenaries of the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) landed at Malé by sea and moved on the government.
  • The operation was organised by a Maldivian businessman, Abdullah Luthufee, working with Sri Lankan Tamil militants recruited for money — a coup by contract, not an insurgency with a domestic base.
  • The attackers seized the National Security Service headquarters, the broadcasting station and much of the capital within hours, but failed to capture President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who moved between safe houses and telephoned for help.
• Gayoom appealed to six governments — the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore.
  • The United States indicated it would take two to three days to move forces from Diego Garcia; Britain advised Malé to approach India.
  • The episode is the cleanest demonstration of a proposition India has argued ever since: in the central Indian Ocean, only India can respond in hours.

The Indian response

• Rajiv Gandhi convened the service chiefs and authorised the operation the same night; the force was in the air within about sixteen hours of the request.
  • Two Ilyushin Il-76 transports carried the strike element of the 50th Independent Parachute Brigade from Agra, flying 3,700 kilometres non-stop with fighter escort.
  • Indian paratroopers landed at Hulhulé in darkness, secured the airfield, crossed to Malé in commandeered boats, and reached President Gayoom and restored government control within hours of touching down; a second wave followed on 4 November.
  • Nineteen people died, most of them mercenaries; Indian forces suffered no fatalities.
• The operation’s speed rested on capabilities India had built for other purposes — strategic airlift, a parachute brigade held at readiness, and a navy able to operate at range — and it is regularly cited as the model for what later doctrine calls first-responder capability.

The interception at sea

• A group of mercenaries escaped Malé by hijacking the freighter MV Progress Light, taking Maldivian hostages including a cabinet minister.
  • Indian maritime patrol aircraft located the vessel; the frigates INS Godavari and INS Betwa, supported by embarked helicopters, intercepted it off the Sri Lankan coast.
  • After the hijackers killed two hostages, the Indian ships opened fire and marine commandos boarded and took the survivors; the captured mercenaries were handed over to the Maldives for trial in July 1989.
• The naval component is what turns Cactus from a successful air-landing into a demonstration of integrated joint capability across an ocean basin — and it is the part that most impressed foreign observers.

The reception abroad

“Thank God for India. President Gayoom’s government has been saved.”

— Margaret Thatcher

• Ronald Reagan described the intervention as a valuable contribution to regional stability, and the operation was received in Western capitals as a legitimate response to a request from a recognised government.
  • This was unusual: it came at the end of a decade in which Indian regional interventions had drawn suspicion, and it followed the IPKF deployment in Sri Lanka, which was becoming a costly failure at the very moment Cactus succeeded.
  • The contrast between the two is the lesson: Cactus was invited, brief and terminated on completion; the IPKF was invited, open-ended, and became a combatant.

What India did not take

• The analytically decisive fact about Operation Cactus is what followed it: India took no bases and no basing rights — no lease, no permanent garrison, no exclusivity.
  • Indian forces withdrew once the immediate task was complete, and the relationship reverted to development assistance and training.
  • India did not use its leverage to demand a security treaty, veto over Maldivian foreign policy, or a formal defence agreement — instruments it could plausibly have obtained in November 1988.
  • India did use quiet influence in one respect: Gayoom commuted the death sentences passed on the captured mercenaries.
• That restraint is why Cactus remains citable sixty years into the relationship as evidence of a security provider rather than of a hegemon — and why the argument that India’s 1988 conduct proves benign intent is not merely propaganda.
• It also produced a cost India has never fully absorbed: rescue bought goodwill, not exclusivity. Within a few years the same Gayoom was in Beijing, and the notion that 1988 created a permanent Indian claim on Maldivian policy has been falsified repeatedly since.

The pendulum, presidency by presidency

Gayoom, 1978–2008: rescue without exclusivity

• Maumoon Abdul Gayoom governed for thirty years, through six uncontested referendum-style terms, and his India policy was consistently friendly and consistently non-exclusive.
  • India was the security guarantor of last resort — demonstrated in 1988 — and the principal source of training, technical assistance and emergency supply.
  • But Gayoom never conceded India a veto, and the volumes that treat his period as an era of Indian primacy misread it.
• The turn to China began under Gayoom, and long predates the “China threat” literature.
  • He visited Beijing in 1984 and again in September 2006, and Chinese firms entered the Maldivian project-contracting market from 1985.
  • China supplied annual assistance and was a visible relief donor after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which devastated the archipelago and reset every donor relationship in the country.
  • The strategic point is that hedging is older than any Chinese “string of pearls” design — a small state with one dominant neighbour will look for a second patron regardless of what that patron is called.
• Gayoom’s later years were increasingly authoritarian, with opposition figures — including a young Mohamed Nasheed — repeatedly jailed, and it was the pressure for democratisation, not foreign policy, that ended his rule.
• India’s assessment of the Gayoom era is the honest baseline for the whole relationship: goodwill is real, transferable to no successor, and buys access rather than obedience.

Nasheed, 2008–2012: “India First” and the GMR backlash

• The first multi-party presidential election, in 2008, produced the country’s first democratic transfer of power and brought Mohamed Nasheed and the Maldivian Democratic Party to office.
  • Nasheed made “India First” an explicit doctrine — the first time a Maldivian government had formally subordinated its external alignment to the relationship with New Delhi.
  • He declined to give China a foundation for critical infrastructure, in deliberate contrast with his predecessor’s drift.
• The security content of the relationship deepened sharply in these four years.
  • The Maldives permitted Indian coastal radars on 26 atolls, networked into India’s own maritime domain awareness picture — the single largest expansion of Indian surveillance reach in the central Indian Ocean.
  • Joint naval exercises with the Indian Navy became regular, and India took on the training of the Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF), a role that today covers roughly 70% of the force’s training.
  • India also became the provider of medical evacuation and search-and-rescue across the atolls, using aircraft it gifted and crews it stationed.
• The domestic backlash came through economics, not security, and this is the pattern that has repeated ever since.
  • The 2010 award of Malé’s international airport to a consortium led by the Indian infrastructure firm GMR — the largest foreign investment in Maldivian history — became the opposition’s organising grievance.
  • The charge was that a strategic national asset had been handed to a foreign company without adequate legislative sanction, and it fused nationalist, religious and anti-incumbent sentiment into a single campaign.
  • The opposition had won ground in the 2009 Majlis elections, led by Gayoom’s camp, and used its position to make the contract ungovernable.
• Nasheed resigned on 7 February 2012 amid police and military mutiny, alleging he had been forced out at gunpoint. India recognised the successor government quickly — a decision that cost it heavily with the MDP’s supporters and is the first clear instance of India being punished for choosing stability over the incumbent.

Waheed, 2012–2013: the cancellation and the first sharp downturn

• Vice-President Mohamed Waheed Hassan took office at the head of a “unity government” and moved simultaneously toward China and away from India.
  • The government cancelled the GMR airport contract in November 2012, declaring it void from the outset and giving the consortium seven days to leave.
  • The dispute went to international arbitration, which eventually held the termination wrongful, and awarded substantial damages against the Maldives — an outcome that vindicated the Indian position legally and changed nothing politically.
• India suspended assistance and downgraded engagement, the first time it had used economic instruments against Malé.
  • Waheed took a combative public line, warning external powers against interference in Maldivian affairs — language Muizzu would reuse a decade later.
  • India’s leverage proved real but slow: it could impose costs, but it could not restore the contract or shorten the crisis.
• The episode established the template of the modern relationship: a big Indian commercial or security presence becomes the opposition’s chosen target; a new government cancels it; India retaliates economically; and the retaliation delays rather than prevents the swing back.

Yameen, 2013–2018: the closest tilt to Beijing

• Abdulla Yameen won a protracted, disputed election in November 2013 and his Progressive Party of the Maldives took control of the legislature, campaigning on a pledge to defend Sunni Islam and on economic nationalism.
• The bilateral relationship with China was transformed in a single visit.
  • Xi Jinping visited Malé in September 2014 — the first Chinese head of state to do so — and nine agreements were signed covering roads, a power plant, airport development and a bridge between Malé and Hulhulé.
  • The Maldives endorsed the Maritime Silk Road and joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, becoming the first South Asian state to sign up to the maritime component of China’s initiative in such explicit terms.
  • The Sinamalé (China–Maldives Friendship) Bridge, opened in 2018, is the physical emblem of the period — the most visible piece of infrastructure in the capital, and Chinese-built.
• The 2017 China–Maldives Free Trade Agreement was pushed through the Majlis in under an hour, with the opposition absent and no meaningful scrutiny of a nearly thousand-page text.
  • The manner of ratification became the substantive objection: the agreement was attacked at home and abroad less for its terms than for the demonstration that Maldivian institutions could be bypassed for a Chinese deliverable.
• Yameen also amended the constitution in 2015 to permit foreign ownership of land for investors committing over US$1 billion and reclaiming a share of the project area — a provision India read as opening the door to a permanent foreign presence on Maldivian soil.
• India’s response through this period was to hold the line without escalating.
  • Delhi kept the training, medical evacuation and technical channels open, and Sushma Swaraj’s visit of October 2015 signalled continued engagement despite the tilt.
  • India also moved into the space China was occupying by other means, including cooperation on a Maldivian communications satellite with the Indian Space Research Organisation.
• The state of emergency declared in February 2018 — after the Supreme Court ordered the release of political prisoners and Yameen arrested two of its judges and his own half-brother Gayoom — produced the relationship’s most consequential Indian non-decision.
  • Nasheed, in exile, publicly requested Indian military intervention; sections of the Indian commentariat urged a second Cactus.
  • India declined to intervene militarily, restricting itself to public statements of concern and diplomatic pressure. That restraint is the necessary companion to 1988: Cactus was a response to an invitation from a sitting government, not a licence to arbitrate Maldivian politics.
• India was widely judged to have “lost” the Maldives in 2018. Within eight months the judgment was obsolete — which is the best warning available against reading any single Maldivian moment as permanent.

Solih, 2018–2023: restoration, and the campaign against it

• Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s victory in September 2018 restored “India First” as declared policy, and Prime Minister Modi attended his inauguration in November 2018 as the only visiting head of government.
  • The Maldives withdrew from the China Free Trade Agreement — the clearest signal available that the previous alignment was being reversed.
  • The relationship acquired an institutional density it had never had: defence cooperation dialogues, joint staff talks, joint EEZ patrols, white-shipping information exchange, and the Ekuverin and Ekatha exercises alongside the trilateral Dosti exercise with Sri Lanka.
• India’s financial commitment in this period was unprecedented for a country of this size.
  • A package of about US$1.4 billion was announced in December 2018, combining budgetary support, currency swap, treasury-bill subscription and concessional credit.
  • An US$800 million line of credit signed in March 2019 funded the development programme, with a further US$100 million added in 2022.
  • The Greater Malé Connectivity Project — the largest infrastructure undertaking in Maldivian history, linking Malé to Villingili, Gulhifalhu and Thilafushi by bridge and causeway — was financed with a US$400 million line of credit and a US$100 million grant.
  • Other projects included social housing at Hulhumalé, water and sanitation across 34 islands, the National College for Policing and Law Enforcement, and the redevelopment of the Hanimaadhoo and Gan airports.
  • A parallel programme of High Impact Community Development Projects supplied building materials for public parks on 67 outer islands and small works chosen by island councils rather than by Malé — the least expensive and most politically effective Indian spending in the country.
• The “India Out” campaign was run against Solih, not against India.
  • Launched by Yameen’s supporters and amplified after his imprisonment, it demanded the removal of Indian military personnel and the cancellation of agreements signed with India.
  • Its target was the Uthuru Thila Falhu (UTF) harbour agreement of 2021 — an Indian-funded MNDF coast guard facility — and the small Indian aviation detachment.
  • The Solih government banned the campaign by presidential decree in 2022 as a threat to national security, which converted a slogan into a free-speech grievance and made it more useful to the opposition, not less.
• The lesson India drew too slowly: the more India built, the larger the target, because in a state this small every Indian project is a national political question.

Muizzu, from 17 November 2023: elected on “India Out”

• Mohamed Muizzu, formerly mayor of Malé and Yameen’s construction minister, won the runoff of 30 September 2023 as the standard-bearer of the “India Out” coalition and took office on 17 November 2023.
  • His first foreign visits were to Turkey in December 2023 and China in January 2024, breaking the convention that a new Maldivian president visits India first — a deliberate and legible signal.
  • In Beijing he signed some twenty agreements and returned with a formulation that became the slogan of his first year in office.

“Maldives is not any country’s backyard.” — Mohamed Muizzu

• His first substantive demand was the withdrawal of Indian military personnel, and it was met.
  • About 75 Indian personnel operated two Dhruv advanced light helicopters and a Dornier maritime surveillance aircraft from Hanimaadhoo, Kadhdhoo and Addu Atoll — gifted platforms flown for medical evacuation, search and rescue and EEZ surveillance.
  • The two sides agreed a phased replacement; the personnel were withdrawn in stages through March to May 2024, and the replacement by an Indian civilian technical team was completed by 10 May 2024.
  • The aircraft stayed and the crews changed status rather than function, but the capability was preserved. Muizzu delivered the symbol his voters wanted while keeping the service his islands needed.
• The derogatory-remarks episode of January 2024 turned a diplomatic disagreement into a mass phenomenon.
  • Three Maldivian deputy ministers posted contemptuous remarks about the Indian Prime Minister after his visit to Lakshadweep, which Indian commentary had framed as an alternative island destination.
  • The response in India was a social-media boycott campaign that produced real cancellations; Indian arrivals fell from first to fifth among source markets within weeks, and the estimated loss to the Maldivian economy ran to about 2 billion rufiyaa.
  • The officials were suspended, but the damage demonstrated the asymmetry precisely: an unofficial Indian consumer reaction was more costly to Malé than any formal Indian sanction had ever been.
• The reversal that followed was driven by facts on the ground rather than by diplomacy.
  • Suspension of Indian-operated medical evacuation contributed to a child’s death during an emergency transfer, which was politically devastating.
  • Alternative food shipments arranged from Turkey were delayed during the Red Sea crisis, exposing how thin the alternatives to Indian supply actually are.
  • Foreign reserves fell from about US$590 million at end-2023 to about US$444 million by August 2024, and public debt passed 116% of GDP, with the IMF warning of debt distress.
• Muizzu attended Modi’s swearing-in in June 2024, and by October he was in New Delhi on a full state visit. The pendulum had completed its swing in under a year.

The repair, 2024–2026

The recovery of the relationship after 2024 is the article’s contemporary centre, and it was accomplished almost entirely with financial and developmental instruments rather than security ones. India did not demand the reversal of “India Out”; it made the Maldivian fiscal position survivable and let necessity do the rest.

The October 2024 reset

• Muizzu’s state visit to New Delhi, 6–10 October 2024, produced the framework document that now governs the relationship: a joint vision for a Comprehensive Economic and Maritime Security Partnership.
  • The two sides agreed to begin negotiations on a Free Trade Agreement and a Bilateral Investment Treaty, converting an aid relationship into a trade-and-investment one.
  • Contested projects were restored rather than renegotiated, including hydrographic cooperation and the Ekatha harbour at Uthuru Thila Falhu that “India Out” had been built around.
• The financial core of the reset was two currency swap arrangements concluded in October 2024.
  • A US$400 million dollar swap and a ₹30 billion rupee swap — together roughly US$760 million — under the Reserve Bank of India’s framework for SAARC countries.
  • The rupee leg matters more than its size suggests: it lets Malé settle a portion of its Indian trade without spending scarce dollars, which addresses the exact constraint that was strangling the economy.
  • India separately subscribed to and rolled over Maldivian treasury bills, including successive US$100 million interest-free rollovers, and the State Bank of India took a US$50 million T-bill in May 2024 when no one else would.
• This was rescue without conditionality, and it is the single most important data point on India’s neighbourhood method: the money went to a government that had campaigned against India and had just expelled its personnel.

The July 2025 visit and the rupee turn

• Modi visited Malé on 25–26 July 2025 as guest of honour at the Maldives’ 60th Independence Day, the first Indian leader to be so invited, and the visit was staged explicitly around sixty years of diplomatic relations.
  • India extended a line of credit of ₹4,850 crore — about US$565 million — denominated in rupees, replacing earlier dollar-denominated facilities.
  • An amendatory agreement cut the Maldives’ annual debt-servicing obligation on Indian credit by about 40%, from roughly US$51 million to about US$29 million.
  • Six memoranda were exchanged, covering fisheries and aquaculture, meteorology, digital public infrastructure, UPI, recognition of the Indian Pharmacopoeia, and the concessional credit facility; the terms of reference for FTA negotiations were exchanged at the same time.
• The deliverables were physical and immediate rather than promissory.
  • 3,300 social housing units at Hulhumalé were handed over, along with 72 vehicles and equipment for the MNDF.
  • Modi inaugurated the new Ministry of Defence headquarters in Malé and launched roads and drainage in Addu City, water and sewerage across 28 islands, and six further community projects.
• The shift to rupee-denominated lending is the strategically significant move, and it is easy to under-read.
  • It reduces the Maldives’ dollar exposure at a moment when dollar scarcity is the binding constraint on the entire economy.
  • Combined with RuPay card acceptance and UPI rollout, it creates the possibility of settling bilateral trade and tourist spending in rupees and rufiyaa rather than in dollars — which locks in a monetary interdependence that no election can quickly reverse.
  • This is the instrument China cannot match: Beijing lends in dollars and yuan, but it does not supply the tourists whose spending clears the balance.

Delivery, at last

• Hanimaadhoo International Airport was inaugurated on 9 November 2025, built under the EXIM Bank line of credit at a construction cost of about US$136.6 million.
  • It opens the northern atolls to direct international traffic for the first time, diversifying a tourism industry that has been concentrated around Malé.
  • The president who had campaigned on “India Out” opened an Indian-built airport and called it a monument to the strength of Maldives–India ties.

“This is not just an airport, it is a symbol of economic transformation.” — Mohamed Muizzu

• The Greater Malé Connectivity Project reached its decisive milestone in August 2026, with the final bridge segment linking Malé to Villingili placed.
  • The 6.74-kilometre bridge-and-causeway link to Villingili, Gulhifalhu and Thilafushi is the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in the Maldives, and it is Indian-financed and Indian-built.
  • Its completion answers the standard charge against Indian assistance — the gap between announcement and delivery — in the one place where China’s Sinamalé Bridge had provided the visible counter-example.
• Water and sanitation on 34 islands, of which 28 had been handed over by August 2024, is the least glamorous and most politically effective Indian programme in the country, because it reaches the outer atolls that Malé-centred projects never touch.

Trade, the FTA and the sixtieth year

• The first round of India–Maldives FTA negotiations concluded on 15 July 2026, after eight technical sessions held virtually from 29 June to 7 July, with substantive progress across eight policy areas.
  • India’s chief negotiator was Ujjwal Kumar Ghosh of the Department of Commerce; the Maldives was led by Yusuf Riza.
  • Both sides committed to expediting both the FTA and a Bilateral Investment Treaty, and Maldivian Foreign Minister Iruthisham Adam has set signature by end-2026 as the target.
• Bilateral trade stood at about US$771.76 million in 2025–26, up 13.54%, making India the Maldives’ second-largest trading partner.
  • India supplies pharmaceuticals, engineering goods, cement and aggregate, rice, sugar, wheat flour, vegetables and fruit, much of it under a standing quota arrangement that exempts the Maldives from Indian export bans on essential commodities.
  • That exemption is a quiet instrument of enormous weight: India guarantees food security to a state that grows almost nothing, and it does so by carving the Maldives out of its own restrictions.
• Defence cooperation has resumed and deepened without a return to stationed personnel.
  • India continues to provide roughly 70% of MNDF training, with over 1,500 personnel trained in Indian institutions in the past decade; the Defence Cooperation Dialogue and Joint Staff Talks meet annually.
  • Indian assets have flown well over six hundred medical evacuation and search-and-rescue missions since 2019, and joint EEZ patrolling has continued through every political phase.
  • As late as 31 August 2026, an Indian National Defence College delegation was in Malé for a strategic study tour with the Maldivian Defence Minister and the MNDF leadership — routine engagement of a kind that would have been unthinkable in early 2024.
• 2026 is the sixtieth year of diplomatic relations, and both governments have used the anniversary as scaffolding for the FTA push, the connectivity completions and the framing of the partnership as generational rather than transactional.

India’s recovery in the Maldives was purchased with treasury bills, currency swaps and a bridge — not with a single soldier.

The China ledger, bilaterally

China’s regional strategy belongs to the wider account of its footprint in South Asia. What belongs here is the specific bilateral ledger — what Beijing has actually signed with Malé, what it has actually delivered, and what that leaves India facing.

• The China–Maldives Free Trade Agreement entered into force on 1 January 2025, seven years after Yameen rushed it through the Majlis and six years after Solih walked away from it.
  • Its revival under Muizzu is the clearest evidence that the Maldivian pendulum now swings on both axes at once — the FTA with China took effect in the same period in which negotiations with India opened.
  • Its economic effect so far has been asymmetric: Chinese goods enter duty-free while Maldivian exports to China remain negligible, so the agreement has widened rather than narrowed the trade gap.
• A free military assistance agreement was signed with China in March 2024, weeks before the last Indian personnel left.
  • Its published content is modest — non-lethal equipment and training — but its timing and sequence were the message: the security vacuum created by the Indian withdrawal was filled, at least symbolically, within weeks.
  • It followed the docking of a Chinese research vessel at Malé, of a class India has repeatedly protested elsewhere in the region for its survey capability.
• The debt position is the substance of the Chinese relationship.
  • Chinese lending inherited from the Yameen years is estimated between US$1.4 billion and US$3.1 billion, against total Maldivian debt above 131% of GDP.
  • About US$75 million was refinanced in September 2024, and in October 2025 Beijing agreed a five-year deferral of Chinese debt — relief that buys time without reducing the principal.
  • Chinese grant aid of about US$130 million was pledged in January 2024, mostly for roads, and Chinese state enterprises hold contracts including the Rasmalé land reclamation programme.
• The direction of financial exposure has, however, moved toward India during the same period.
  • Chinese lending exposure fell from about US$613 million in 2021 to about US$473 million in 2025, while Indian EXIM Bank exposure rose from about US$15 million to about US$572 million.
  • India is now the larger creditor as well as the larger trading partner, and the larger tourism source — a position it did not hold at any point during the Yameen years.

• The honest assessment is that Muizzu has not chosen China over India — he has institutionalised the hedge.
  • He holds a trade agreement with each, credit from each, defence cooperation with each, and dependence on both — and has arranged matters so that neither can be dispensed with, and neither can dictate.
  • Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy’s judgment that India is “playing the long game” through economic leverage rather than exclusivity demands is the right frame, with his caveat attached: India should not read the repair as a return to “India First”.
  • The Maldivian formulation for this posture is “Maldives First”, and it is a more durable settlement than either “India First” or “India Out”, because it is the only one that does not require the next president to reverse it.

The hedge is not a defeat for India. Insisting that it be abandoned would be.

The security file India cannot outsource

• Radicalisation is the Indian Ocean security problem that the tourism brochure conceals, and it is a genuine Indian concern rather than a talking point.
  • At least 300 Maldivians travelled to Syria and Iraq between 2013 and 2018 to join the Islamic State, including families — and on the per-capita measure the Maldives has the highest foreign-fighter outflow in the world.
  • Mohammed Sinan Siyech puts the number of extremists currently resident in the country at at least 1,400, some with bomb-making experience acquired abroad.
  • Returnee networks in a state with no meaningful counter-terrorism capacity, 1,192 dispersed islands and a tourism economy that cannot tolerate visible policing are a problem India would have to help manage even if the two countries were on poor terms.
• The domestic drivers are economic and criminal before they are theological.
  • Roughly 30 gangs, each with between 100 and 500 members, operate as distribution networks for narcotics and as recruitment pipelines into extremism, since stigmatised ex-offenders find few legitimate routes back.
  • Heroin trafficking through the archipelago, high youth unemployment, and the extraction of public money — the laundering scandal of the Yameen years ran to some US$1.5 billion — supply the material grievance that ideology then organises.
  • Displacement of the traditional Shafi’i tradition by Saudi-funded Salafism and Pakistani madrassa influence supplies the idiom.
• The anti-India edge of Maldivian extremism is specific and growing.
  • Indian embassy staff, teachers and medical personnel have been targets of intimidation, and the 2022 attack on a yoga event in Malé was the point at which “Indophobia” became physical rather than rhetorical.
  • The overlap between electoral anti-India politics and religious anti-India mobilisation is the most dangerous feature of the relationship, because it gives a fringe with violent capability a mainstream vocabulary to hide in.
• Maritime security is the second file, and here the relationship has been continuous through every political phase.
  • The Maldives has an exclusive economic zone of about 923,000 square kilometres and no capacity to police it; illegal fishing, narcotics trafficking, and human smuggling all run through it.
  • Indian coastal radar coverage, white-shipping information exchange, joint EEZ patrols and maritime domain awareness sharing are the substance of the security relationship — and they survived “India Out” because they are invisible.
  • The Colombo Security Conclave, in which both are members, provides the plurilateral setting; the point for this relationship is simply that Malé has stayed in it through every swing.
• Climate is the existential file, and it shapes Maldivian diplomacy more than any other single factor.
  • With over 80% of its land less than a metre above sea level, the Maldives is the most exposed state on earth to sea-level rise, and its posture at the UN, in climate negotiations and among small island states is organised around that fact.
  • India’s usefulness here is as a partner on adaptation, renewable energy and disaster response rather than as a source of finance.
  • Its credential is its record as first responder — the 2004 tsunami and the 2014 Malé water crisis, when a fire disabled the capital’s desalination plant and Indian aircraft and ships airlifted drinking water within hours.

Debates and critiques

Was Operation Cactus a precedent or an anomaly?

• The case that it is a precedent rests on capability and record: India alone could act in hours, it did so on request, it took nothing, and it left. On that reading the operation is the founding demonstration of what SAGAR and its successor framing MAHASAGAR mean in practice.
• The case that it is an anomaly rests on the conditions that made it possible and have not recurred.
  • The request came from an unambiguously legitimate sitting government facing foreign mercenaries, not from a faction in a domestic dispute.
  • The task was militarily trivial and politically bounded; there was no insurgency, no population to hold, and no exit problem.
  • India’s refusal to act in 2018 — when Nasheed requested intervention against Yameen’s emergency — shows that New Delhi itself treats Cactus as non-replicable, and rightly.
• The synthesis is that 1988 established a capability claim, not a doctrine of intervention, and that the distinction has been maintained with more discipline than critics of Indian “hegemony” allow.

Did the military footprint ever earn its cost?

• The case for the personnel is functional: about 75 people flew helicopters and a Dornier that performed over six hundred medical evacuations and rescues, gave India radar and surveillance reach across the central Indian Ocean, and cost the Maldives nothing.
• The case against is political, and it has won the argument.
  • The detachment was too small to be strategically decisive and too visible to be politically invisible — precisely the worst combination in a state where every foreign presence becomes a national controversy.
  • It supplied the opposition with an organising grievance for four consecutive election cycles, and it was the one Indian asset whose removal could be photographed.
  • The capability was preserved without the personnel. Civilian technical crews fly the same aircraft on the same missions, which proves the presence was never the point.
• The conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: the military footprint was worth less than the goodwill it cost. India’s own conduct since 2024 — repairing the relationship through finance while conceding the withdrawal — amounts to accepting that verdict.

Is Neighbourhood First delivery or announcement?

• The critique is that India announces large packages and delivers slowly, so that Chinese projects are finished and visible while Indian ones remain in progress. For a decade the Sinamalé Bridge against the unfinished Greater Malé link was the standing illustration.
• The rebuttal has strengthened considerably since 2025. The Hanimaadhoo airport opened in November 2025, the Greater Malé link closed its final span in August 2026, 3,300 housing units were handed over, and water and sanitation reached 28 of 34 islands.
• The deeper defence is about kind rather than speed: India’s instruments — treasury-bill rollovers, currency swaps, food quota exemptions, medical evacuation, training — are the ones that operate in a crisis, and no other partner supplies them.
• The residual criticism stands on project selection: India has repeatedly financed large, capital-city-centred, highly visible works that maximise political exposure, when the outer-atoll water, health and education programmes generate more goodwill per rupee and almost no controversy.

The debt-trap framing and its limits

• The debt-trap account of Chinese lending — that infrastructure loans are designed to create defaults and extract strategic assets — is contested and should be stated carefully rather than assumed.
  • What the Maldivian record supports is narrower and more interesting: China’s newer engagement runs less through mega-projects than through debt refinancing, deferral, grants and commercial contracts, which builds dependency without the political backlash a seized asset would generate.
  • A five-year deferral is not forgiveness. It moves the obligation, keeps Malé returning to Beijing, and preserves the leverage.
• India’s counter has been to compete on the same ground, rather than on the terms of the debate — rupee credit, swaps, T-bill subscription and debt-servicing relief — which is more effective than arguing about whether the Chinese loans were predatory.

What the Maldives teaches Indian neighbourhood policy

• Presence is read as intrusion in small states. The smaller the partner, the larger the proportion of national politics any Indian footprint occupies — and the more certain it is that an opposition will campaign against it.
• Capability can usually be separated from presence. The single most transferable lesson of 2024 is that India kept the surveillance, the aircraft and the evacuation capacity while surrendering the uniforms, and lost almost nothing operational.
• India’s real leverage is the economic lifeline and its own geography, not deployment. Food quotas, medicine, tourists, treasury bills, currency swaps and a four-hour flight are what make India indispensable; a detachment of seventy-five never did.
• Delivering the invisible beats delivering the spectacular. Water and sanitation on outer islands, MNDF training and medical evacuation survived every rupture; the airport contract, the harbour agreement and the aviation detachment did not.
• Do not align with a faction. Every Indian reverse in this relationship — 2012, 2018, 2023 — followed a perception that New Delhi had a preferred Maldivian government, and every recovery followed India dealing with whoever won.
• The pendulum is a feature, not a betrayal. Treating each swing as ingratitude produces exactly the resentment that fuels the next swing; treating it as the predictable output of a small, presidential, personalised, import-dependent democracy produces the patience that has now worked twice.
• Restraint is a strategic asset, with a long shelf life. Sixty years on, the fact that India took nothing in 1988 is still the most persuasive thing New Delhi can say about its intentions in the Indian Ocean — and it is persuasive only because it is true.

Conclusion

Sixty years of diplomatic relations have produced a relationship that is structurally close, politically volatile and, on the evidence of 2024 to 2026, unusually resilient. The volatility is not a symptom of Indian mismanagement or of Chinese success; it is what a winner-takes-all presidency in a tiny, personalised, tourism-dependent polity does with the one foreign-policy issue that every voter recognises.

• What has proved permanent is the material substrate: proximity, food and medicine, tourists, training, evacuation, and the credit that keeps Malé solvent.
• What has proved reversible is everything visible: contracts, harbours, personnel, slogans and the declared alignment of the day.
• The correct Indian posture follows directly — be indispensable in the first category, modest in the second, and indifferent to the rhetoric in between.
• The FTA, the rupee line of credit, UPI and RuPay are the right instruments precisely because they build interdependence that no incoming president can cancel by decree, and that no Chinese offer can substitute for.