The Chinese islands

A brooding presence is shrouding the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Maldives, steering it in a direction inimical to India’s core national interests. This shadow with a takeover mentality is called China and it is advancing with a whole range of levers being welcomed by the pro-Beijing regime of President Abdulla Yameen.
On July 23, Mr Yameen ratified a law passed by the Maldivian legislature permitting foreigners willing to invest over $1 billion to permanently own land, clearing the path for China which is waiting in the wings with incredible surpluses and resources.

For the Maldives — whose entire area is merely 298 square kilometres of land vulnerable to climate change-induced rising sea levels — to open itself even partially to foreign ownership has far-reaching ecological and geopolitical consequences.

The new land measure does stipulate that foreign investors must reclaim 70 per cent of the purchased territory from the ocean. But the giveaway is the prospect of buying the reclaimed land forever rather than leasing it for a specific duration. It is basically an invitation to colonise the Maldives’ coastline for commercial activities with potentially disastrous impacts on the fragile marine ecosystem.

Scientific studies show that poorly regulated land reclamation alters the coastal environment and worsens seawater quality. Flooding, erosion, sedimentation, depletion of fishing stocks and damage to vegetation are widely observed outcomes of this human engineering marvel of hauling up submerged reefs by dredging water. Such miracles are being performed by parties to the conflict in the disputed South China Sea, with China leading the show by virtue of its superiority in maritime dredging. Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan have managed to reclaim only 100 acres of land over 45 years, but China has surfaced 3,000 acres of new islands under its control within the last 18 months alone.

The warning bells are obvious for the Maldives. If China decides to pursue a strategic goal, it presses into service a mammoth scale and proportion that is unheard of in the history of infrastructure building. Despite the Maldivian government’s denials of Opposition allegations that the foreign ownership law is a “sweetener for China”, only Beijing has the technical expertise and monetary capability to grab the opportunity at hand. The keenness with which Mr Yameen’s government has endorsed China’s gigantic “One Belt, One Road” connectivity initiative suggests that the land ownership law is an enabler of Beijing’s designs to expand its influence in the Indian Ocean region.

Mr Yameen claims that the influx of capital through the land law will boost special economic zones (SEZs) to diversify the Maldives’ economy away from tourism, which contributes 70 per cent of the its GDP, and where China has already captured the market with lightning speed. Chinese tourists in the Maldives have quadrupled from 100,000 in 2010 to nearly 400,000 this year. The Maldivian tourism ministry recently admitted, “Chinese tourists exceeded the Maldivian indigenous population for the first time.” China’s Xinhua news agency approvingly quotes Maldivian hoteliers portraying their pristine islands with white beaches as “having a new name now — Chinese Islands”. So profuse is the Chinese tourist footprint today that seasonal highs and lows emanating from the calendar of Chinese festivals and vacations have swing effects on the Maldives’ economy.

Even if the land law reduces Maldives’ over reliance on tourism, China has positioned itself to shape the Yameen government’s new SEZs. Beijing has bagged standout construction projects in the Maldives such as the international airport that was controversially snatched away from India’s GMR group by the previous Maldivian government, and a landmark “China-Maldives friendship bridge”.

The foreign land ownership law would thus consolidate China’s overall grip over the Maldives, with Mr Yameen playing along due to domestic political vendetta against the pro-India Opposition leader and former President, Mohamed Nasheed, who has been imprisoned under concocted charges of terrorism. In light of China’s relentless penetration of the Maldives, what are India’s options? We need to disabuse ourselves that China is a problem only if it inserts its military. The anxiety in India that Maldives’ land law will pave the route for Chinese military bases misses the point that China is already the No. 1 power there through civilian methods and it occasionally slips in the military under that cover. For instance, when an acute water shortage loomed in 2014, China dispatched its Air Force jets and Navy vessels to deliver humanitarian aid in Male.

Beijing does not need fulltime bases to call the shots in foreign countries. Our naval patrolling and manoeuvring in the Indian Ocean must therefore prepare and plan for signalling and deterring temporary but continuous Chinese inroads.

Since the Chinese are unrivalled masters at physical infrastructure, and given that our land reclamation companies would be handicapped by the anti-India dispensation in Male, we need to make a bigger concerted effort to nurture the Maldives’ social and human capital, which holds the key to swaying public opinion.
Our intellectuals should offer maximum advice as consultants to raise the subpar capacity of the nascent Maldives National University. The scholarships and trainings we give to Maldivian youth and civil servants must be multiplied several fold. The Maldives has a majority Muslim population which is of South Indian origin, holding tremendous potential for enhancing our natural educational and cultural links, something the Chinese cannot artificially generate the way they reclaim barren islands.

In tourism, there must be an Indian government-guided effort to promote the Maldives as a prime holiday destination for our upper middle class, whose size and discretionary spending are growing but whose gaze is fixated on the Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore routes. Politically, the injustice being meted out to Mr Nasheed is certainly a cause of concern and deserves Indian advocacy. But we must also reach out to Mr Yameen and place on the table whatever benefits he hopes to get from India. We cannot afford to be typecast as a foreign power identified only with one party, ideological camp or ethnic group, a phenomenon that has in the past cost us dearly in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh. The Chinese have planted themselves in the Maldives and we have little time to lose to implement a multipronged strategy to ward off this challenge in our backyard.

The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs