Behind the scenes

Officials in the Indian foreign policy establishment are working overtime to ensure that the political situation in the Maldives does not slip into a deeper crisis after a defiant ousted president Mohamed Nasheed alleged a coup was behind his ouster.

With hectic parleys still on, new President Mohamed Waheed expanded his cabinet to include members from different parties, in an attempt to cobble together a majority government.

But a sense of uncertainty still grips the Maldives, the archipelago comprising around 1200 scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, since Nasheed resigned as President on February 7. Fierce clashes erupted between his supporters and the police after they laid siege to the street outside the parliament building, the Majlis, shouting slogans against the current regime.

Weekend diplomacy

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's envoy Madhusudan Ganapathi, who flew to Male on a special flight, held a series of meetings over the weekend with US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Robert Blake, with Nasheed and Hassan, and with the chief justice of the country's apex court and local politicians.

India had felt compelled to send a special envoy after the violence, which spread from Male to other parts of the country, following the brutal police crackdown on the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) rally.

"There is no countenancing of any intervention at all. It is engagement. It is for Maldivians to take charge," Ganapathi said following his return to New Delhi.

"The situation is, of course, complex. We would like to see it resolved in an atmosphere of calm and peace so that it does not affect the common man in the Maldives," he added.

The turmoil in this tiny country of less than 400,000 people has attracted the attention of the United States, Britain, India and other countries in the Commonwealth.

Now with the Commonwealth deciding to send a ministerial mission to look into the circumstances that led to Nasheed's ouster, there could be some respite from the political crisis.

India wants reconciliation

For its part, India has advised the new political dispensation to ensure that Nasheed is not arrested or harmed in any way and is at the same time trying to ensure a peaceful transition of power in the island nation.

"The Maldives is certainly in a political flux and there is no sense even now how the national unity government will work. This is going to take time. But India clearly failed to anticipate the sequence of events and was caught by surprise," Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar, a former officiating director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told Deutsche Welle.

New Delhi has said it is looking at the current political crisis as an "internal matter," and made clear that it won't interfere militarily. In 1988, under an operation codenamed "Operation Cactus," India sent a small military contingent to the Maldives to liberate Male from a band of Tamil rebels from Sri Lanka who had seized power for a few hours.

"Most nations agree that India had a pre-eminent role to play in resolving the crisis in the Indian Ocean archipelago. There should not be a further descent to chaos," strategic expert Rahul Das told Deutsche Welle.

Behind the larger churning going on in the island nation, Indian diplomats and the intelligence are also keeping a close eye on the situation to make sure that the country does not slip into the trap of Islamic fundamentalists.

Author: Murali Krishnan
Editor: Sarah Berning