Maldives: How armed drones from Turkey may replace Indian aerial watch

With the deployment of two Turkey-made ‘ Bayraktar TB2’ military drones with attack capabilities, Maldives has become the first nation to have an Air Corps dependent exclusively on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). President Mohamed Muizzu, while launching the drones at North Maafaru Airport in Noonu Atoll, relatively closer to the Indian coast, however, said that there was no enmity towards any nation for them to be concerned about his government strengthening the nation’s military capabilities. Instead, it was only a part of the efforts for Maldives to stand on its own feet to secure its vast EEZ – and be empowered – he declared.  “It is a fundamental duty and honour,’ he said.

Muizzu said the vast EEZ presented a tremendous opportunity for the nation to expand the economy of the region and secure a prosperous future for ‘our descendants’. He declared an end to concerns regarding self-power in vast areas of the country emphasising a new-found ability to manage these territories independently.  The president took an indirect snipe at India, without naming it, that Maldives would now be able to ‘patrol our borders, and others don’t have to worry about it’.

As if responding to the Opposition MDP’s claims that while in power, they were in negotiations for free delivery of UAVs from a country, Muizzu said that Turkey too had gifted some equipment – but did not provide details. He claimed it owed to his friendship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , who also fast-tracked the delivery of the drones with unprecedented speed for such transactions.

However, neither did Muizzu say which among the equipment came as gifts or if a particular number of drones too were included in the list. As was to be expected under the circumstances, the government has not shared the details of the drone deal with the nation – when sought by the media. As may be recalled, during the presidential poll campaign, Muizzu reiterated that if elected he would place all foreign agreements signed by past governments, and also those of his own, before Parliament and the nation.

According to early information that Muizzu shared with the media on his return from China in mid-January, the drone deal was worth $37 million. According to military experts, it could procure five or six drones in all with allied components. Hence, the question of drone gifts, if any, assumes greater significance. Incidentally, the president said that in the subsequent phases, drones would be deployed elsewhere across the country, possibly implying southern islands and airports closer to the contested IMBL with Mauritius, where incidentally, India has built an airstrip on Agaléga Island.

Ingenious way

There is no denying the ingenious way Maldives has entered the air defence space without acquiring fighters and more expensive attack aircraft. According to some American news analyses, a drone costs less than 20 times the price of a fighter jet. Of course, those calculations were made independent of the emerging situation in Maldives.  Drones come with their operational limitations compared to a fighter jet, but can still cause enough damage, both as defensive and offensive weapons.

However, in the case of Maldives, no one is visualising a full-scale war with any nation or non-state player. Hence, the limited number of drones at the nation’s disposal may not matter compared to a warzone like the Russia-Ukraine theatre. But their aerial surveillance capabilities and Maldives’ choice of end-user of the collected data could matter to nations like India and Mauritius, if not Sri Lanka, a common neighbour in the region.

The question is simple: Will Maldives use drones to swoop down on strategic installations in India along its path? When some of it will be unavoidable, how intentional would such deployment be? Will the nation then share it with India’s adversaries like China and Pakistan?

The inherent limitations of the drones could attest to the host nation’s ‘intentions’ to have only defensive air-power and not any offensive machines.  Because it is the least expensive way to acquire an air arm for national defence, Maldives’ experience can set the trend for other smaller and less-resourced nations, whether islands or not, to create an air defence force to call their own, as Muizzu began dubbing it in the early days of his presidency, since November 2023.

As coincidence would have it, the drones-launch function came days after the exit of the first of the three batches of unarmed Indian military personnel manning the two helicopters and one fixed-wing Dornier that New Delhi had gifted, for undertaking humanitarian operations like medical evacuation, and also air surveillance of the nation’s huge EEZ. There was no question of Indian aerial platforms carrying weapons when their pilots did not carry personal arms. In contrast, the Turkish drones are armed though the fact remains that they will be operated by local military personnel, instead.

Incidentally, on Muizzu’s insistence, the Indian pilots and technical staff are being replaced by ‘technical personnel’, meaning civilian pilots and technicians from India. The first batch of pilots left recently after the incoming technical staff had become acclimatised. However, it remains to be seen if it is only an interim arrangement before Muizzu asks India out for good, once his plans for a separate domestic air-ambulance service and the drone-based aerial surveillance work stabilises on the ground – or, is it in the air?

Whatever that be, the high-level core groups tasked by President Muizzu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Dubai, to discuss all bilateral matters, had their third meeting at the Maldivian capital of Male on Sunday. According to a statement by India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), ‘both sides reviewed the ongoing deputation of Indian technical personnel to enable continued operation of Indian aviation platforms that provide humanitarian and medvac services to the people of Maldives’.

The two sides also ‘continued their discussions on wide ranging issues related to bilateral cooperation. This inter alia, included expediting the implementation of ongoing development cooperation projects through regular convening of joint monitoring mechanisms, efforts to boost bilateral trade & investment and enhancing people-to-people linkages through capacity building and travel’, the statement said. By implication, it referred to India-funded projects, including the $500 million Male-Thilafushi Bridge and a host of high-impact development projects across the country.

Funding drones’ purchase

However, issues may remain. As Indian officials repeatedly pointed out, during the early days of the Muizzu regime especially, the depletion levels of India-trained MNDF pilots for manning the helicopters and the lone Dornier was high – and that was the reason why the Indian pilots, though coming in on rotational deployment, could not go home for good. The MNDF has since published photographs of their personnel manning the control of the drones, but there is no knowing if there is an international market for them, like for trained pilots.

Yet, the fact remains that Muizzu has kept his word to his people that he would soon have Maldivians watching over their EEZ (instead of Indians). But to acquire drones at such short notice has caused eyebrows to raise, both inside the country and outside. The implication is that the strategy to introduce drones in the place of Indian aerial surveillance and trade negotiations with Turkey might have informally commenced even before Muizzu was elected President in end-September 2023.

If so, there are concerns as to who did the strategising for Muizzu – Maldivians or outsiders? There are also concerns about the financing of the drone purchases, as they seem to fall outside the government’s budget for the current fiscal, commencing January 2024. Granting Muizzu’s statement that some of the equipment were personal gifts of his Turkish counterpart, there is still a huge monetary gap to fill. Where did the government raise the funds from, and how?

One up on Yameen

It is anybody’s guess who had strategised Muizzu’s approach in the matter. Looking back, through the short and medium terms, it is clear that a hurriedly put-together air-ambulance service that is already at work and the drones-centric MNDF Air Corps now may have completed the process for his government to ask India out of twin-sectors at one go.  To this end, the Muizzu government has also hurriedly-concluded a tie-up with hospitals in neighbouring Sri Lanka, to be reached through the air ambulance service. For now however, it is being deployed only between suburban reclamation island of Hulhumale and capital Male, with better hospital facilities.

Yet, by doing it all in a systematic way and putting the horse before the cart, Muizzu may have also proved to be one up on his estranged political mentor and one-time president Abdulla Yameen – now technically in prison but has been campaigning for the 21 April parliamentary election within the Greater Male region. In the closing months of his presidency (2013-18), Yameen had unilaterally asked New Delhi to take back the aerial platforms that India had gifted in the past and also the personnel manning them. He made it into an ‘India Out / India Military Out’ campaign while in the Opposition during the successor regime of ‘India-friendly’ president Ibrahim Mohamed Solih (2018-23) of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

The common Maldivian was not happy with Yameen’s demands, while in power and even more so when out of it. The emergency medical evacuation in an archipelago-nation was a boon. The law-enforcing agencies too had acknowledged the usefulness of aerial surveillance as it helped in larger seizure of drugs in transit.

As the Indian High Commission (IHC) in Male too repeatedly pointed out, in the five years of operations, their military team had done 500 medivac sorties. Likewise, their aerial surveillance had helped a large cache of drugs, which has become a perennial menace in the archipelago as about 10 per cent of the population are believed to have become addicts.

Of equal concern is Maldives remaining a major hub for international drug trafficking, which along with India and Maldives forms an ‘IOR triangle’ for large quantities of illegal drugs sourced from the ‘Golden Crescent’ and ‘Golden Triangle’ across India’s land borders in the north-west and north-east, respectively. Muizzu’s current strategy seems to be asking India out only after addressing domestic concerns – and thus not becoming as unpopular as Yameen on this score (as well).

Economic independence

Yet, there is no denying the unwilling Yameen hand in Muizzu’s policy initiatives. The lesser-known and even less-remembered foreign policy document rolled out by Yameen in January 2014 put ‘economic independence’ as the sine quo non for political independence in matters of foreign and security policies. However, Muizzu has put Yameen’s policy frame-work on its head, and has made security issues the core of his foreign and domestic policies.

In context, the Muizzu leadership signing a ‘comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement’ during his China visit in January, when he met his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, too needs to be remembered. So are China’s promised cooperation under the nation’s Global Development Initiative (GDI), Global Security Initiative (GSI) and Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI) apart from the revival of Maldives’ participation in China’s BRI from the Yameen era.  It remains to be known if ‘economic independence’ would follow from any of Muizzu’s initiatives involving China and or Turkey, over the short and medium terms. Going by published accounts, the strategic cooperation agreement is limited to Muizzu’s initial term of five years, ending in 2028.

At least for now, the Maldivian Monetary Authority (MMA), the nation’s central bank, has claimed that the monthly budget for February ended on a positive note, and attributed it to better tax and duty collections and also higher tourist-arrivals. However, local media reports have pointed out that the month was bereft of any known development investment and argued that if the trend continued, the ill-effects would be felt over the medium and long terms.

However, knowledgeable Maldivians say the economy is on a positive recovery path, but will take time to stabilise. They are also concerned about huge out-of-turn procurements and poll promises that the president might be tempted to offer like his predecessor Solih did for a whole year and more in the run-up to last September presidential poll, which however he lost.

While it is acknowledged that the ‘Boycott Maldives’ call led to a 33 per cent fall in Indian arrivals, the full impact, if any, will be known in subsequent months. Incidentally, even before the boycott call that followed the defamatory posts by three junior Maldivian ministers against India and Prime Minister Modi, China had begun reclaiming its top slot as the tourist source nation after it opened out, post-Covid. As if for effect, Muizzu publicly urged China to do it, while in that country. Some Maldivians feel that the real impact of the ‘boycott call’ in India will be known only at the end of the current examination season in that country, which naturally cuts into family holidays and the like.

Best practices

In what looks like a coordinated effort to make the drone work meaningful, the Cabinet has since decided to make it mandatory for all sea-bound vessels to install tracking devices, for easy identification. It is in furtherance of the continuing governmental efforts over the past decades, to combat drug trafficking. The government can also claim to have introduced ‘international best practices’ in the matter, which most other nations in the region have mandated only for larger vessels.

Incidentally, from prior to the Muizzu presidency, the MNDF had started intercepting foreign fishing vessels, including those from India and Sri Lanka. During the closing weeks of the Solih regime, an Indian vessel was ordered to pay Rs2.27 crore while another vessel was taken into custody recently. A Maldivian civil court recently ordered an equally hefty fine on another foreign vessel – thus clearly sending out a strong message.

From a purely Indian perspective, the MNDF’s initiative in this regard, now to be supported by drone-search, could add a new element to strained bilateral relations. However, unlike in the case of common neighbour Sri Lanka, bilateral fishers issue is not a great concern in the case of Maldives. The reported use of Indian fishing vessels using the Maldivian seas for ‘innocent passage’ are few and far between, yet the message is clear that they have to remain clean and should have some way to prove that the catch on board was not fished in the nation’s territorial waters.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.