Perilous ripples can come from Maldives

India has always considered the Indian Ocean as its region of special interest and is therefore naturally concerned with events there. The regime change in the Maldives in 2012 is one such, where continuous and unprecedented public demonstrations and civil turmoil finally forced President Mohammed Nasheed, the head of state for 30 years, to step down on February 7 this year, handing the reins of government to President Mohammed Waheed Hassan.
The Maldives are not geographically or ethnically part of the Arab world but allowing for local variations, the course of events on the island immediately prior to the resignation of President Nasheed were very similar to those of the Arab Spring of 2010 in Libya, Egypt and Yemen as well as Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa. Like them, the Maldives too were all old-style authoritarian dictatorship ultimately overthrown by massive challenges from the “people’s power” of civil societies demanding meaningful democracy and devolution of political rights and powers to the people, putting authorities on notice that aspirations of the people for democratic governance could no longer be taken for granted or militarily crushed.
The situation in the Maldives requires careful and continuous examining. It can be construed as a projection of the Arab Spring into the Indian Ocean region, except that the Maldives is neither. It was a major event that took place in India’s neighbourhood just about three months ago, but never really got registered in the public mind. It has already faded from public memory in India, provided they ever registered it in the first place.
Immediately following his abdication, President Nasheed claimed that he had been forced to resign under duress from the police and military forces of the country. Regime change in the Maldives is, of course, an internal matter to be decided by its people, but the big question that concerns India is not the change itself per se but the possible presence of external influences that may have been behind the drama.
By virtue of its geographical proximity, India has strong ties of traditional cultures and friendship with the Maldives with whom it has always shared a special relationship. India has maintained all along that the fallout of the Arab Spring in various countries is the internal matter of the countries concerned. But now, there is also an uneasy realisation in India that the regimes coming into power in countries “liberated” by the Arab Spring may well be democratically elected, but not necessarily secular in nature, tending markedly towards Islamist ideologies with undertones of Salafi-Wahabi fundamentalism. This would be cold comfort for secular multicultural societies like India because Islamist elements in these countries would be receptive to the more radical mutations of Islamist ideology propagated by jihadi organisations sponsored by covert intelligence services of countries like Pakistan. The pattern is well established and the environment would not be comfortable for India, who should examine the antecedents of the widespread civil unrest that ultimately deposed President Nasheed.
Therefore, political instability and civic disturbances in the Maldives have to be perceived in the larger context of the spread of radical fundamentalism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. The Maldives are geographically isolated entities, strategically vulnerable to any type of external intervention. A pattern has already been demonstrated in 1988, when a parachute battalion of the Indian Army was dispatched to the island as a rapid response force following an urgent request by the government of the Maldives for assistance against a Tamil terrorist group called the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam attempting to takeover the island (Operation Cactus).
Such situations may recur if radical jihadi groups sponsored by covert government agencies like the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) attempt to take over islands like the Maldives or the Seychelles.
Other forms of such interventions could exploit externally sponsored civic unrest to force a government from office ostensibly by apparently legitimate political movements.
The Indian Ocean forms the maritime littoral of South Asia, East Africa and the Gulf. A very large volume of maritime traffic traverses the area, and the small — sometimes very tiny — nations which straddle the sea lanes of the region have acquired strategic prominence, often out of all proportion to their geographical dimensions or economic resources. The upper reaches of the Arabian Sea around the Horn of Africa have become a latter day Barbary Coast, centred on the ungovernable state of Somalia, incorporating pirate fleets and the indigenous jihadi group Al Shabab.
Cleaning out these pirate base camps will require major air-land operations, to which no individual government has been willing to subscribe so far. Somali militant clans have been subsumed by the Al Qaeda and the only deliberate attempts to subdue and control them to date have been made by Ethiopia. These operations have been relatively unsuccessful so far and have failed to impart any degree of urgency to efforts at international cooperation to deal with the menace of pirate kingdoms.
The time may not be too far off when Somali pirates, having upgraded their equipment, and received military training and leadership from covert agents, or jihadi professionals from Al Qaeda or the Taliban, turn Al Shabab into a formidable entity posing a serious challenge to governments both in the East African region as also internationally. It also may not be totally unthinkable to visualise the admittedly extreme contingency of an Islamic Emirate in the islands of the Indian Ocean. Unless India maintains an alert watch in its own vicinity, the present instability in the Maldives may well be a distant indication of the shape of things to come.

The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament