Maldives-India ties sour further, President Muizzu withdraws pact to conduct hydrographic surveys
In a major setback for India, China-friendly Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu has announced that he will not renew an agreement with New Delhi to conduct hydrographic surveys and plans to acquire the facilities and machines required to do the exercise by itself. Muizzu also announced that his country is working to establish a 24/7 monitoring system for the Maldivian waters this month to ensure control of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) despite its significantly large area.
This announcement comes days after China signed a defence cooperation agreement with the Maldives to provide free military assistance to foster stronger bilateral ties. India-Maldives ties have suffered a setback ever since pro-China Muizzu assumed office last year. Hours after he took oath in November 2023, Muizzu had vowed to ensure Maldives’ sovereignty and one of the first steps was to demand India to withdraw all its troops. The previous week, a Chinese research vessel spent about a week around Male and more than a month just outside Maldives’ EEZ.
Speaking at a ceremony at one of the islands that he was visiting on Monday, Muizzu said, the Maldives Ministry of Defence is making efforts to obtain the facilities required for conducting the hydrographic surveys by the country itself. “This will allow Maldives to conduct the underwater surveys of the country by ourselves. We will then acquire all insights of our underwater features and prepare charts, they will be drawn by us,” the president was quoted as saying by Edition.mv, a news portal on Tuesday.
Maldives’ former administration, led by then President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, had signed an agreement with the Indian government to conduct hydrographic surveys of Maldives underwater.
All these underwater details are our property, our heritage,” Muizzu said and claimed the Maldives earlier needed to purchase all such maps and survey data from India. This is the first time that Muizzu has publicly commented about the hydrographic survey plans of his government.
His government has earlier announced that it reviewing more than 100 agreements signed with India by the previous regimes. The most recent hydrographic survey carried out in collaboration with India’s Hydrography Office was launched in January 2021 as part of the agreement signed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019 during his visit to Maldives. Recently Maldives had asked India to remove all Indian Forces and civil officers from the Island by May 10.
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Urge all Indians to stop going to Maldives