Maldives in South Asia: Let’s talk about Saudis

Listening to the various papers presented by regional academics, it occurred to me the Maldives figures very little in the conversation around forging a common South Asian identity. This is not to deny there is interest in the Maldives among specialists on regional dynamics—many projects at the Institute for Defence and Security Analysis (IDSA), said to be one of India’s foremost think-tanks, are focused especially on the Maldives. I also met two Indian postgraduate students doing their research on Maldivian socio-politics, and one person who is about to publish a book on the Maldives. No doubt there are many more South Asians with scholarly and policy-level interest in the Maldives. But, the Maldives was missing from the main shared narrative of culture spoken of at the conference. On many occasions, many of the speakers referred to a South Asia where all nations are diverse. A South Asia of pluralist nations are engaged in daily conversations with a thousand different ethnicities, languages, religions, and customs. All South Asian nations, the general consensus seemed to be, are pluralist, secular, and democratic.

The Maldives is none of these things: it is within the throes of a rapid authoritarian reversal; in the process of establishing a Wahhabi and Salafist hegemony; and has rejected democracy as an antithesis to Islam.

If the countries of South Asia really want to form a culturally diverse union akin to the European Union, which is what was envisaged at the conference, the primary requirement is to know, and appreciate, each other’s culture beyond global headlines. Many scholars at the conference told anecdotes about shared borders, languages and religions. They collectively remembered genocides, partitions, bloody wars. There is a little bit of each other in all South Asian countries but, somewhere along the way, Maldives has been somehow set apart and aside from its neighbours. Their cultural story is not among the threads with which the common South Asian identity is commonly woven today.