Ignoring values

Why the Maldives' election is bad news for India

After an energetically contested run-off, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom has been declared the victor in the Maldives' election over former president Mohamed Nasheed. Abdulla Yameen Gayoom is the half-brother of Maumoom Abdul Gayoom, the former dictator of the island nation. Mr Nasheed himself was removed in a coup in 2012, after which he had sought refuge in the Indian embassy; he also won the initial round of voting before losing to Mr Yameen in a hotly disputed final run-off, in which the difference might have been made by extremist Islamist elements in the Maldivian political spectrum. India's official statements have expressed the country's neutrality between both forces in the election; an unexpressed hope is that, given the past comfort that India's foreign policy establishment had in working with Mr Gayoom when he was dictator, his half-brother would be similarly easy for New Delhi to manage.

This view is insupportable. In fact, this result is not good news for India, and is a direct consequence of New Delhi's mismanagement of the situation following the coup that unseated Mr Nasheed. Instead of supporting Mr Nasheed, a conservative foreign policy establishment decided to, essentially, abandon his claim to the presidency and tacitly indicated it would happily work with whoever held power. The short-sightedness of this was immediately apparent. Major contracts to Indian companies became the subject of controversy; many political figures made statements attacking Indian diplomats. By abandoning the India-friendly Mr Nasheed, New Delhi narrowed its foreign policy options in the Maldives in such a way that it is now forced to spin an embarrassing regional defeat as a victory.

What is worse is that Mr Yameen's victory reveals the extent of the inroads made by more fundamentalist forms of political Islam in India's neighbourhood. This is all of a piece with what is happening in Bangladesh, where the dominance of the incumbent and secularising Awami League has been challenged by the more conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its Islamist allies. While some of this is due to local factors, India's inability or unwillingness to support friendly parties in its region is on display in both countries. And, in both countries, this has led to a constriction of possible future foreign policy alternatives, leaving New Delhi with the troubling possibility of dealing with Islamist-influenced governments that will take India-unfriendly positions.

This is a reminder, in fact, that a foreign policy that is based on values like secularism and democracy is, in fact, in India's interests even when viewed from a strictly realist perspective. Had India valued secularism and democracy sufficiently, it would have recognised that an Awami League-led government in Bangladesh was such an asset that it would have gone the extra mile to make its tenure a success. Had India valued secularism and democracy sufficiently, it would have stepped in to defend Mr Nasheed's right to the presidential position after he was removed last year. In both cases, a values-based approach would have led to significant real gains for India in its neighbourhood. Instead, India faces the daunting challenge of dealing with rampant Islamism in South Asia and the inevitable spillover of that regional ascendancy into its own domestic problems.