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NEW DELHI: China and the Maldives are in talks for a bilateral visit to Beijing by President Mohamed Muizzu that could take place, as a source in Male told ToI, in a matter of a couple of weeks. If it happens, Muizzu will become the first democratically elected Maldivian president to visit China before travelling to India.
In a break from the past, defying successive Maldivian presidents who chose India as their first port of call, Muizzu had first visited Turkey as president, before landing in Dubai for the COP28 summit.
In fact, every Maldivian president since the dawn of multiparty democracy in 2008 in the strategically located Indian Ocean country, including virulently anti-India leaders like Mohamed Waheed in 2012 and Abdulla Yameen 2 years later, had first visited India, a fact often cited by Indian authorities as symbolic of India’s “pre-eminent” position in the Maldives and the latter’s stated India First policy.
However, China will only be the third country that the newly elected president will travel to. Muizzu’s visit to Turkey was seen also by some as signalling to both India and China that the Maldives will not remain dependent on either of them for its development objectives.
Buoyed perhaps by the exit of Muizzu’s pro-India predecessor Ibrahim Solih, China seems to have lost no time in inviting Muizzu, whose aides have denied repeatedly the president’s characterisation in the media as a China-leaning leader. It’s not clear yet if Muizzu has received a similar invite from India, which will follow closely the outcome of Muizzu’s meeting with his counterpart Xi Jinping.
The visit will come in the middle of concerns in India about Muizzu’s insistence on driving out Indian military personnel involved in operating naval choppers gifted by India to the Maldives for HADR activities. While India is hoping for a workable solution for continued operations of these Indian assets, Muizzu said after his meeting with PM Narendra Modi on the margins of COP28 that India had agreed to withdraw its troops. In the middle of all this, Maldives recently also announced it had decided to walk out of an agreement with India that allowed the Indian Navy to carry out hydrographic surveys in Maldivian waters. The agreement had been signed during Modi’s visit to Male in 2019, when Solih was the president.
The last Maldivian president to visit China was Yameen, who worked overtime to target Indian interests in the country in the last year of his presidency, in 2017. The visit saw the 2 countries signing a secretive free trade agreement and also a deal to let China build an observatory in one of the westernmost atolls, setting off concerns in India that it would allow China a vantage point of an important Indian Ocean shipping route through which many merchant and other vessels pass.
In a break from the past, defying successive Maldivian presidents who chose India as their first port of call, Muizzu had first visited Turkey as president, before landing in Dubai for the COP28 summit.
In fact, every Maldivian president since the dawn of multiparty democracy in 2008 in the strategically located Indian Ocean country, including virulently anti-India leaders like Mohamed Waheed in 2012 and Abdulla Yameen 2 years later, had first visited India, a fact often cited by Indian authorities as symbolic of India’s “pre-eminent” position in the Maldives and the latter’s stated India First policy.
However, China will only be the third country that the newly elected president will travel to. Muizzu’s visit to Turkey was seen also by some as signalling to both India and China that the Maldives will not remain dependent on either of them for its development objectives.
Buoyed perhaps by the exit of Muizzu’s pro-India predecessor Ibrahim Solih, China seems to have lost no time in inviting Muizzu, whose aides have denied repeatedly the president’s characterisation in the media as a China-leaning leader. It’s not clear yet if Muizzu has received a similar invite from India, which will follow closely the outcome of Muizzu’s meeting with his counterpart Xi Jinping.
The visit will come in the middle of concerns in India about Muizzu’s insistence on driving out Indian military personnel involved in operating naval choppers gifted by India to the Maldives for HADR activities. While India is hoping for a workable solution for continued operations of these Indian assets, Muizzu said after his meeting with PM Narendra Modi on the margins of COP28 that India had agreed to withdraw its troops. In the middle of all this, Maldives recently also announced it had decided to walk out of an agreement with India that allowed the Indian Navy to carry out hydrographic surveys in Maldivian waters. The agreement had been signed during Modi’s visit to Male in 2019, when Solih was the president.
The last Maldivian president to visit China was Yameen, who worked overtime to target Indian interests in the country in the last year of his presidency, in 2017. The visit saw the 2 countries signing a secretive free trade agreement and also a deal to let China build an observatory in one of the westernmost atolls, setting off concerns in India that it would allow China a vantage point of an important Indian Ocean shipping route through which many merchant and other vessels pass.
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