Maldives results: What does the victory of Muizzu’s party mean for regional relations?

Six months after being elected president with a convincing win, the People’s National Congress (PNC)-Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) combine’s Mohamed Muizzu has led his alliance to a ‘super-majority’ in the parliamentary polls, held on Sunday, April 21. Pending official results, which in the past had taken a couple of days, Maldivian media reports put the figure between 60 and 66 in a House of 93, up from 87 after de-limitation. There are four MPs from three pre-poll allies of the Muizzu group and six independents, whose loyalties are not known yet.

It is tempting to qualify the ruling combine’s clean sweep as an endorsement of President Muizzu’s ‘anti-India’ policy or ‘pro-China programmes’. The former has been slow in coming, while the latter has been swift in the making since Muizzu was sworn in as president on November 17. Yet, there is no denying the possibility of someone in the president’s team, even if not Muizzu himself, interpreting the parliamentary poll sweep as a massive mandate on his foreign policy (read: India-China policy). But the ground realities tell an entirely different story.

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It’s a positive vote in Muizzu’s favour. It is also a negative vote against the Opposition, particularly the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) of predecessor President Ibrahim Solih. According to some reports, former foreign minister Abdulla Shahid, who took over as acting party chief from Solih, was focusing more on his candidature for the presidential poll in 2028 than the job at hand. The same applies to most top party leaders, who have had their own political ambitions.

Opposition’s antics

That was all an internal-party affair. But it was the MDP’s antics inside Parliament in the past month since Solih lost power in the end-September elections that seemed to have rallied the voters to rally behind Muizzu—if only to ensure that he had a full and undisturbed term, unlike in the past. Including the anti-defection law that is pending before the President for clearance, the MDP’s non-parliamentary initiatives included a weird interpretation that the vacancies caused by MPs becoming ministers should not be included in counting the total membership.

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The Supreme Court promptly struck down that resolution, and people agreed with Muizz that it was all aimed at impeaching him without giving him time to even breathe and settle down. Likewise, the MDP majority in Parliament passed an anti-defection law towards the fag-end of the Parliament’s term. The question now is whether the bill would become infructuous now that a new Parliament has been elected and the president’s last of 15 days to give his assent or return the bill falls only on Monday, April 22.

It did not stop there, either. MDP’s Speaker of Parliament, who is also an ex officio member of the Judicial Services Commission (JSC), complained that the High Court verdict in jailed former President Abdulla Yameen’s graft case had not been pronounced even four months after the conclusion of his appeal hearing. It was a joke, as the common perception was that the MDP government of President Solih had done maximum damage to judicial administration in matters relating to Yameen’s three cases, particularly this one (‘Aarah case’), relating to the allotment of resort islands and allegations of money laundering benefiting Yameen, when he was president (2013–18).

As if this were not enough, the MDP and Yamee’s yet-to-be-recognised People’s National Front (PNF), which had fielded a lot of ‘independents’, swapped support for each other in select constituencies. The voters saw it as farcical, to put it mildly. Their true colours were revealed when Yameen’s aides openly began talking about ‘impeaching’ Muizzu at the first available opportunity in the new Parliament, with of course the support of the MDP and breakaway Democrats of yet another former President Mohammed Nasheed, once the nation’s most charismatic political leader, not any more.

Old order gives in

In the final count, the MDP won only 11 seats, with Speaker Mohamed Aslam losing his southern atoll seat after 20 years. The Democrats drew a blank, and no one from the Yameen camp has claimed that at least one of the six independents was their man. The losers included two children of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Both Dunya Maumoon and Faarish Maumoon lost as independents, while their brother Ghassan Maumoon remains the all-important defence minister of President Muizzu.

The long and short of it is that the old order has given in, and the new order has commenced. Muizzu is possibly the only national leader who was not associated with the two-decade-long ‘democracy movement’, which led to a new Constitution under a multi-party scheme. A technocrat, he holds a PhD in structural engineering from Leeds University in the UK and also has substantial experience in the trade before becoming Housing and Works Minister under President Waheed (2012–2013) and continuing as such in the successor Yameen regime.

Being a greenhorn who had worked with a few leaders and their political parties, Muizzu seemed to have seen opportunities that a trained eye could not visualise and exploited them to his advantage. But there could be a problem. The unwritten dictum in democracy is that where the political Opposition is weak, fissures appear in the ruling combine.

It happened to the MDP in the previous years when President Solih and his one-time mentor fought it over the party. The same applied to Yameen and Muizzu, though the circumstances were slightly different. Today, Muizzu may be sitting on a tinderbox that could explode, though not anytime soon. How he manages the situation from now on will prove his ability to control situations.

Legacy issue

Though the international media is hyped about Muizzu’s India policy and post-parliamentary polls, his prime task is to meet his voters’ expectations on incomes, jobs, and prices. While his drone deal with Turkey may have ensured that the Maldives could do without Indian assistance for the past years, there is no knowing if Muizzu’s declaration that he would import essentials like rice, flour, and sugar from Turkey to ensure that they were not dependent on a ‘single source’ has not become a reality.

India recently increased the export quotas of these essentials to the Maldives to an all-time high. The list included aggregates and river sand required in the construction industry, starting with the tourism industry, the nation’s economic mainstay.

Looking from outside, it looks as if India would have no problem if China or Turkey wanted to share the burden of development expenses and provide essentials. As if on a trial basis, China recently supplied a shipload of drinking water from Tibet after New Delhi rushed assistance when capital Male’s only desalination plant was gutted in an accident in end-2014.

In the midst of the parliamentary poll campaign, China and the Maldives signed an agreement for the former to develop a 20,000-ha farm to produce fruits and vegetables and ensure ‘self-sufficiency’ (and end imports from India?). During the last weeks of the presidential poll campaign, the government of President Solih too signed a few developmental agreements of the kind with China.

India’s problem in the neighbourhood is all about individual nations cutting a strategic deal with the nation’s adversaries. It was the US in the Cold War era, China now, and Pakistan in between. Pakistan is not in it now, even as China’s B-Team, owing to the economic crisis engulfing that nation.

Right or wrong, New Delhi has been careful not to comment on the internal affairs of the Maldives in the past months, nor has it officially joined the issue on the likes of cheap criticism of India (that involved Prime Minister Narendra Modi) by three of Muizzu’s deputy ministers some months ago. After that, Muizzu has been careful to make all India-centric comments and observations personally, but they too have been caustic and loaded at times.

The perception was that he was competing with the estranged Yameen for their common pool of conservative and/or ‘Islamic nationalist’ constituencies’ votes. The results have shown that they voted for Muizzu, like every other constituency in the country, including the so-called ‘pro-India’ vote bank, which is there only in some people’s imagination.

Now that Muizzu has become the master of all that he surveys, he may be inclined to review his words and actions of the past months and apply correctives on all fronts. In domestic politics, he can afford to be magnanimous after the High Court freed Yameen but ordered a re-trial just two days before parliamentary polls.

On the foreign policy front, it is not about Muizzu’s magnanimity but pragmatism in taking forward the strained India relations. He needs to accept that bringing in extra-regional powers into these parts can only work against peace and prosperity in the Maldives over time. It is a legacy issue that Muizzu has to think about – whether he wants to become one more poll-centric leader or an emerging statesman who needs vision and has to display the same now that his domestic concerns are all settled in his favour.

True, the Maldivian voter will not be bothered about the nation’s India relations on a daily basis as long as his basic necessities are met. But he will still be taking notes and keeping them away to check and validate five years from now, when Muizzu seeks re-election, whether unquestioned foreign policy initiatives have made the Maldives a sitting duck in the Indian Ocean Region’s geo-strategic space.

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