Good morning! Tourism is the biggest contributor to the Maldives’ GDP. And Indians account for the largest number of tourist arrivals. Scratch that, they used to. It all changed in January 2024 after a ‘Boycott Maldives’ social media campaign, which aggravated an already uneasy relationship between New Delhi and Male. Ever since he came to power in November 2023, Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu has been viewed as pro-Beijing, unlike predecessor Ibrahim Solih. This shift in diplomatic relations will changing contours in the Indian Ocean. China is on its way to achieving its ‘String Of Pearls’ objective in the strategically-important region, but India isn’t willing to be a mute bystander. Today’s story is about Maldives being a pawn in the larger power tussle between two Asian giants. Bonus: our picks of the week’s best longreads.

If you enjoy reading us, why not give us a follow at @thesignaldotco on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads.

Dhananjay Tripathi

The Maldives is a key player in the Indian Ocean, positioning itself to benefit from India and China’s rivalry.

India is about to start withdrawing its military personnel from the Maldives—80 men in uniform who operate two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft that provide humanitarian and medical services in the Indian Ocean nation. 

After years of close relations with India, the Maldives elected a new president, Mohamed Muizzu, last year. One of his first directives on assuming office was that India withdraw its "military presence" from the archipelago. 

Muizzu is widely perceived to be “pro-China”. But that is not the whole story. 

The domestic politics of the Maldives tends to swing between pro-India and pro-China political players and has considerable impact on its foreign policy.

Muizzu’s predecessor, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, for example, was close to New Delhi and resolutely maintained an "India First" policy. Now the pendulum seems to have swung to the other extreme.

The Maldives has become a playground for strategic competition between the big powers in Asia. 

Its geostrategic location makes it important for both Asian giants, India and China. 

Maritime scholars describe the Maldives as the “toll gate” between the western Indian Ocean chokepoints of the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz and the eastern Indian Ocean chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca.

More than half of India’s external trade and 80% of its energy imports passes through the sea lanes close to the Maldives. 

For China, 80% of its crude oil imports from the Gulf pass through the Strait of Malacca. Experts believe that over-dependence on the Strait of Malacca increases China’s energy supply vulnerability. 

China's overcautiousness about the Indian Ocean region sea lanes is often described as its "Malacca dilemma"—a possible scenario when an antagonist blocks the sea lanes. To avoid this, China has invested heavily in its navy, with special focus on the Indian Ocean.

Beijing is especially apprehensive of US and Indian influence in the Indian Ocean. It perhaps believes that a deepening Indo-US partnership, especially in the Indo-Pacific context, can make things difficult for it as well. 

Aware of these potential challenges, China has sought to increase its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean. It now has a formidable presence at strategically located ports such as  Gwadar in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. 

Gwadar, which is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Belt and Road Initiative, is just 400 km from India. The port is managed by China Overseas Port Holding Company, which is under a legal obligation to support the People's Liberation Army’s overseas operation, if and when necessary.

The Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka is controlled by the China Merchants Port Holdings Company Limited and is also a cause of concern for India.

China is involved in building or financing 17 ports in the region, of which it is directly involved in the construction of 13.

In 2017, China established a military base in Djibouti and it is now eyeing to expand its military presence in Africa. 

With a strong Chinese presence in the Maldives, the so-called "string of pearls" strategy of surrounding India with its strategic naval presence in the Indian Ocean will reach its logical conclusion.  

In 2022, China also launched the China-Indian Ocean Region Forum on Development and Cooperation. In the forum’s second meeting in 2023, more than 350 representatives from 30 countries participated. The central theme was “Boosting Sustainable Blue Economy to Build Together a Maritime Community with a Shared Future”.

These are all examples of Chinese focus on defending its strategic interest in the Indian Ocean, if not dominating it. 

India has taken serious note of Chinese strategic expansion and followed a two-pronged strategy to safeguard its interests. It has tried to consolidate its position in the region by investing in its armed forces and developing better ties with countries in the region. It also launched an initiative called SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) in 2015.

The SAGAR plan seeks to build a climate of trust and openness, address regional concerns, increase maritime cooperation, resolve maritime issues in a peaceful manner and enjoins all Indian Ocean countries to adhere to international maritime rules and norms. 

It is one of India's biggest maritime diplomatic initiatives encompassing security, economic and ecological issues. It projects India as the “net security provider” in the region.

Apart from the SAGAR initiative, India started the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium in 2008 to foster better maritime ties with the navies of Indian Ocean  states.  There are 25 members and eight observers, including China. 

In 1992 India initiated the “Dosti (Friendship)” exercise to link  the Coast Guard forces of India and the Maldives. Sri Lanka joined in 2012.

Recently, 'Dosti-16' was held in the Maldives, even when there were ongoing controversies about the presence of Indian military personnel in the country.  

The second prong of the Indian strategy is to develop closer alliances with the US and other Western powers active in the Indian Ocean. The increasing engagement of India in the region and the close military cooperation between the Quad nations are indicators of this.

In recent months, India-Maldives relations have captured the headlines, not only because of the "notice" served on India to remove its military personnel. There have also been acerbic statements about India by Maldivian ministers trying to woo tourists away from the Maldives, and media commentary in India critical of President Muizzu’s government.

The change in government in Maldives is usually cited as the reason. But this is not the whole story. It ignores the underlying intensity of the Sino-India competition in the region. Tension on the China-India border in the Himalayas remains high, and India is apprehensive about the increasing footprint of China in South Asia, while China is suspicious of the growing defence cooperation between India and the West.

There is a larger political tussle between the two Asian heavyweights going on in the Indian Ocean, and it is likely to be ongoing and not going to be limited to only the Maldives. 

Dhananjay Tripathi is Chairperson and Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Rumble in the jungle: Three thousand three hundred and eighty-nine birds. Over 3,000 herbivores, more than 1,200 iguanas, 857 marsh crocodiles, 229 leopards, and 76 ‘hybrid’ lions. Elephants. Tigers. Hippopotamuses. Chimpanzees. Grizzly bears. A Komodo dragon, And much, much more across 134 species in total. This is Anant Ambani’s 3,000 acre Vantara, an animal rescue and rehabilitation centre situated inside Reliance’s refinery complex in Jamnagar, Gujarat. It now houses more animals than Delhi’s National Zoological Park and has as many individual creatures as New York’s Bronx Zoo.

Before his pre-wedding celebrations with fiancée Radhika Merchant, the youngest Ambani scion did a media tour about Vantara’s crown jewels, an elephant welfare trust and the Greens zoological centre equipped with facilities and word-renowned veterinarians you won’t find anywhere else in India. But how did it acquire so many rescued animals in the first place? The answer to this question is a sprawling 12,000-plus word investigative story in Himal Southasian. The scale of the collusion between government bodies, forest officials, state zoos, and shady animal breeders both here and abroad to acquiesce to one man’s bizarre need to build a Noah’s Ark has resulted in trafficking that’s undoing years of conservation efforts. Read this, and rage.

The people behind modern AI: The Transformer Eight. It’s a term that has nothing to do with the Takara Tomy and Hasbro media franchise or the Michael Bay films, but rather, everything to do with the genesis of AI as we know it today. And Google was the nucleus. Seven years ago, eight Google scientists authored the epochal paper Attention Is All You Need. This thesis on transformers, a neural network architecture, has resulted in a present where countries and corporations play chess in the war to dominate the most disruptive technology since the internet. They are: Jakob Uszkoreit, cofounder and CEO of Inceptive; Character AI’s Noam Shazeer; Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmer of Essential AI; OpenAI researcher Lukasz Kaiser; Cohere cofounder-CEO Aidan Gomez; Llion Jones of Sakana AI; and Near cofounder Illia Polosukhin. WIRED profiles the eight in this anatomy of a breakthrough, taking us back to 2017, when the lot were still with Google and blissfully unprepared for the eventual outcomes of their work.

End of the fund? One of the world’s most popular investment instruments, mutual funds (MFs) manage assets worth about $20 trillion in the US and worth $63 trillion globally. Yet, the industry is peaking. In the three years up to the end of 2023, $1 trillion flowed out of US MFs. February was the first time in two years the industry saw any net inflows; $13 billion. The biggest reason for MFs decline is the rising popularity of exchange traded funds or ETFs. In the same period that MF inflows fell, ETFs grew by $2 trillion, $575 billion of which came last year alone.

The mutual fund was invented a hundred years ago by Edward Leffler. The value of Lefler’s invention is best captured by Jenny Johnson, chief executive of Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.5 in assets, “we got here because there was a fundamental recognition that the system was unfair. The little guy wasn’t getting the investment returns of the equity markets.” MFs caught on after it was streamlined by law in 1940 and later in the 1980s after they became part of the tax-saving retirement plan widely known as the 401(k) plan. Now ETFs are threatening Leffler’s invention, says the Financial Times. In the five years to 2023 the number of ETFs rose to 2,000 and their assets jumped from $2 trillion to $8 trillion.

Keepin’ it in the family: The rise of recreational genetics in the aughts killed off the age of paternity secrets. In the US in particular, cheap DNA tests became all the rage. Dozens of firms such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe sell mail-in test kits and match their customers with other individuals who share similar DNA profiles. In turn, you can’t be an anonymous sperm donor anymore; more likely than not, a curious offspring will sleuth you out. More critically, widespread genetic testing is also exposing how startlingly common incest remains in modern society.

In the ‘90s, for example, frequency of incest was pegged at one in a million. But when geneticist Jim Wilson analysed an anonymised UK biobank database, he found that one in 7,000 people were children of first-degree relatives (parent-child or siblings). And now, as Sarah Zhang writes for The Atlantic, widespread genetic testing is “uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives”. Zhang's recent feature narrates how forty-something Steve Edsel discovered that his biological father was also his mother's father. It spotlights another open secret: the prevalence of young girls sexually abused in their own homes.

In God, should we trust?: In Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, the Opus Dei was the secretive, powerful group of the elite running the world from the shadows—a plot device every good thriller needs. In reality, Opus Dei’s 95,000 members that are linked to banks and governments worldwide are guilty of something much more serious. This investigation in the Financial Times traces how Opus Dei spent decades luring young, rural, working-class women across the world with false promises of free education, only to force them into unpaid labour via psychological manipulation. Women profiled in this piece describe how they hoped to become numeraries or supernumeraries, dedicating their lives to prayer and a vocation. Instead, they spent their best years washing the underwear of male Opus Dei members, and scrubbing toilets for endless hours and no pay. One ran away and another was whisked back home by her parents, horrified at her living conditions. As always, the Catholic Church tried hard to look away, even canonising Opus Dei’s founder Josemaria Escriva in 2002.

Econ 4chan: Frustrated nerds are the lifeblood of 2000s-style messaging boards such as 4chan, but one doesn’t ordinarily imagine a top university’s economist when thinking about said nerds. Yet EJMR (now XJMR), has become a hotbed of toxic anonymous discussions about the highly insular world of economics academics. This story in Bloomberg traces EJMR’s evolution from a discussion board about jobs in academia for economists to viral, anonymous accusations of plagiarism that have nearly decimated the careers of top economists in the US. Besides this, EJMR is infected with posts lamenting the failings of ‘feminists’. It’s a product of the long-standing sexism in economics; even today there is a widespread belief among successful men in the field that women are simply not apt for the job. There’s also a trio of economists who fight back. Using Nvidia chips running nine quadrillion calculations, they identified where the majority of EJMR posts come from and proved that the toxicity runs right to the top. Then, there are the women: an undergrad’s paper proving EJMR’s latent sexism urged more women to openly fight back against the forum.