The first time I heard about the Maldives was in 1988. A group of mercenaries had arrived in the country by sea and had tried to overthrow the government. The then president of the Maldives, Abdul Gayoom, a great friend of India, phoned Rajiv Gandhi who was then prime minister and asked for his help. Could India send the Indian air force to repel the invasion, he asked.
I wondered how this would work. From all accounts, the mercenaries had been largely successful and Gayoom was hiding out in his palace, clutching desperately to the one international phone line that was open, talking to Delhi.
But Gayoom insisted that an Air Force operation would be no problem because the airport was on a different island from the capital. And his government still controlled the airport island.
At that stage, few of us knew that the Maldives was not a single land mass but a collection of many small islands. The capital, Male, was on one island. The airport was on another. And each resort hotel occupied an entire island. All that the mercenaries had achieved was to seize control of most of the island where Male was located.
Rajiv agreed to help. Indian forces went in. The mercenaries fled. The coup failed. And Gayoom was secure once again.
In those days, the Maldives was not the luxury destination it was later to become. There were resorts but they were mostly downmarket and catered to European package tourists. Few Indians went there on holiday though the Taj group ran two resorts there.
By the early 1990s, my curiosity about this island nation became so intense that I finally took an Indian Airlines flight from Trivandrum (there were very few flights from India to the Maldives), was received at the small airport by a Taj employee who had turned up on a motor boat and went on to spend a week at one of the Taj resorts.
The resort, it has to be said, was pretty basic. It had an all-inclusive rate which meant that everyone had to eat the same horrible food from a rubbish buffet. Eventually I gave up and began eating the staff canteen food (dal, sabzi and rice) which was far better.
But none of this mattered. The islands were just so beautiful and the water was so clear that you could see the bottom of the ocean. So, the quality of the food seemed to be of little consequence. Confronted with so much natural beauty, who needed gourmet food or luxurious accommodation?
I haven’t stopped going to the Maldives ever since. And I have seen, first-hand, how much everything has changed. It was an Indian-origin hotelier, Sonu Shivdasani, who opened the first luxury resort (Soneva Fushi) and launched the Maldives as a global destination. Now, it has some of the most beautiful resorts and the highest room rates in the world. Obviously, many people like the natural beauty more when it comes with luxury.
When I first went, nearly all the resorts were a boat ride away from the airport. But as the number of hotels went up, you needed seaplanes to reach them. Eventually, the Maldivian government created a network of domestic airports and internal flights on other large islands. It built a bridge connecting the airport island to the city of Male. And Male itself, which had been a very small town (I once walked from edge to edge in 20 minutes) became a big city with lots of reclaimed land and tall buildings.
Contrary to what we think now, India never became a big source for tourists to the Maldives. For a start, there weren’t even enough flights. And because hotel rates were so high, Indians preferred to holiday elsewhere.
All this began to change during the pandemic when European tour groups stopped coming to the cheaper and the more mid-priced resorts. The Maldives turned to India in desperation, our tourists flocked there, took advantage of special rates and soon every bikini-sporting Bollywood starlet wanted to pose for a photo-shoot at a Maldives beach resort.
Post-pandemic, the number of flights has finally gone up and more Indians are flying to the Maldives. Most are still going to the cheaper resorts but a fair number of high-profile, rich people (including movie stars like Akshay Kumar, a Maldives regular) holiday at the top resorts.
While all this has been going on, political developments have taken place in parallel, but have been largely ignored by tourists. While Gayoom, who regarded himself the father of the nation, was a great friend of India, his successors have examined other options. The Chinese have cultivated successive Maldivian governments, not because they like to snorkel or hang out on the beaches but because they want a naval base and also because they want to encircle India.
The Chinese have tried this sort of thing before, with Sri Lanka, for instance, with disastrous results for Sri Lanka but there are many politicians in the Maldives who seem keen on China anyway. Within domestic Maldivian politics there are pro-India and pro-Chinese factions.
None of this affects tourists who fly directly from the airport to resort islands, bypassing Male and its politics. But it does have consequences for Maldives-India relations. The intemperate statements made by some Maldives ministers last week have been condemned by other Maldivian politicians and even the current government (which is broadly pro-China) has taken action against those who spoke out of turn.
The Indian response has been calibrated. Official statements have been high-minded but we have unleashed trolls and have made film stars tweet against the Maldives. The idea, presumably, is to preserve official deniability but still rattle hostile Maldivian politicians.
In pure tourism terms, the campaign is noisy but may have little effect in the long-run. The absence of Indian tourists will hurt the cheaper resorts but by next season they will have found other target groups.
More significant is the diplomatic fall-out. I doubt if any small nation in India’s sphere of influence can afford to make an enemy of the biggest power in the region. China may well be more powerful than India but it is a long way away.
That’s why the Maldivian government is now engaging in damage control. But yes, there is always a danger that politicians who are not used to governance may say something stupid that further damages relations.
Hopefully, New Delhi and Male will sort out this unnecessary quarrel. The relations between India and the Maldives are deep and long-standing. It would be a shame if inexperienced politicians damaged those ties.
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