Artwork: Dosain
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Our country’s political history is seriously misremembered and incorrectly glorified. We remember villains as heroes, and we worship our politicians and parties. We blame problems on “kuree sarukaaru" and we credit parties and politicians for things that would’ve inevitably happened no matter what party or leader it was.
If we look at the moving averages across a 25-year timespan for things like GDP growth, debt-to-GDP ratio increments, trade balance fluctuations, HDI, corruption perception, Gini coefficient, and revenue growth, we’d find their performance never diverged from the moving average no matter what party or leaders were in power and have a low standard deviation, with the financial shocks in 2008 and 2020 as the only statistical outliers.
This op-ed aims to cut into the meat of our rotten history, particularly into Maldivian Democratic Party (including the hollowed-out Democrats), because while the other parties at least openly profess their fascist hostility towards the working class and loyalty to the ruling elites and capitalism, MDP pretends to represent the working class and occupies spaces that could otherwise platform real working class bodies and parasitically sucks the blood out of them.
That’s not to say the other parties are lesser evils, but rather to say all these parties and politicians are the same clump of looting, murderous, violent, coloniser-pandering capitalists. The problem isn’t a “lesser evil,” it’s that we must choose between evils. There’s currently no one I’d vote for in any capacity, even for mayoralty.
Nasheed and MDP are fundamentally conservative and right-wing by self-admission
A little prior to every election cycle, I’ve observed that MDP’s youth wing recruits unsuspecting youngsters (usually 15 to 23 year-olds) with left-wing aspirations into their ranks. They are too young to know the party’s history, and they sign up with hopeful aspirations thinking this party represents the working class. They hijack tragedies like the murder of Yameen Rasheed and more recently the attempted murder of Yumn Rasheed to launder the party’s reputation.
The party loyalists groom teenagers and young adults into becoming PR fodder for legitimacy every cycle, and by the time they realise this, the cycle is already over, the old batch is discarded, and they’ve begun grooming a new batch. The Democrats rejoining MDP and former President Mohamed Nasheed making amends with former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih are two recent events symbolic of this reputation laundering.
“But this doesn’t mean Nasheed, his aides, and MDP are right wing,” I hear you say. You’re right. It only sets context. In fact, why listen to me? Take it from Nasheed and MDP themselves.
Nasheed’s entire political origin is linked to the British conservative party. He was funded by the British conservative party. His election campaign was run by James McGrath, a racist former right-wing advisor to Boris Johnson when he was London’s mayor. He was aided and advised by the British conservative party during his presidency. His government even normalised Maldives’ relationship with genocidal Israel at the time. Does all that sound left-wing and anti-capitalist to you? Think.
But wait, I’m not done yet!
Nasheed himself described MDP as a centre-right party. He was even elected as chairman of the Asia Pacific Democracy Union, a self-described center-right alliance. Even his own government members at the time described the ethos of his government as center-right. For God’s sake, they’re telling you who they are themselves. Nasheed even says that there isn’t much of an economic and business difference between MDP and the Progressive Party of Maldives, and equates anti-capitalist philosophies – the opposition to Euro-Western imperial values of capitalism – with nonsense.
I ask you again: does all that sound left-wing and anti-capitalist to you? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
If the apartheid-state Israel’s war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is against anti-capitalist economics and advocates for the same thing Nasheed, former President Abdulla Yameen, and everyone else advocates for (free-market capitalism), doesn’t that tell you exactly where to stand on the political spectrum?
The shift to a multi-party system was inevitable; stop giving them undue credit
You may ask me to at least credit Nasheed (and MDP) as heroes for our transition into a multi-party democracy, but I refuse to. Hear me out.
I argue that this transition was inevitable for the Maldives.
Think about our economy. We barely produce our own food, and we have no stockpiles of natural resources (like ores, crude oil, jewels, or luxury crops) to mass-industrialise and export. The only truly valuable resource we have is nature. At the peak of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's era, the tourism industry began to boom as the Maldives placed itself on the global radar.
The transition to the current political model was inevitable because:
1-
Tourism is an industry that relies on good diplomatic relationships with the nations it seeks tourist arrivals from. Tourists are less likely to visit countries perceived as dictatorial. It was in the interest of both foreign and local industry businesses to appeal to this audience.
2-
For foreign multi-national corporations to penetrate our tourist market, they needed to loosen regulations and tighten their hold on our economy with free-market capitalism to disarm us. Remember, locals only fully own 26.29 percent of the resorts today, a testament to a successful economic takeover.
3-
Maumoon was a dying dictator with several domestic grievances on his head for his cruel conduct, murders, theft, and weaponisation of ethno-nationalism. A rebellion was long overdue.
Nasheed simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was opportunism. If it wasn’t him, it’d have been anyone else that the western capitalists would’ve aided and propped up. To remind you once more, the British conservative party ran his campaign for him and informed political decision-making during the first MDP administration.
They weren’t freedom fighters, they were simply the other political tribe who found an opportunity.
My description of the current capitalist democracy wouldn’t differ at all from Elizabeth Colton’s apprehension of the Maumoon regime (at the time, more “democratic” than its predecessors): “The sociopolitical system of the Maldivian elite can be seen to represent evolving, complex cultural replication incorporating, variably and at once, dissonance and patterns of order, repetition and change”.
Like Fathima Musthaq and Azim Zahir correctly argue: “A fundamental obstacle to democracy in Maldives is the predatory elite political culture that provides little to no opportunity for ordinary people to partake in political decision-making."
In effect, the beyfulhu class has simply evolved itself into new bureaucracy, modelled itself after its capitalist parents in America and UK, and have arguably brought about something worse than straightforward authoritarianism: a modern capitalist oligarchy where the oppressed convince themselves that they are free and exercise their own disciplining and punishment under the illusory idea that this is their free-will. Byung-Chul Han calls this psychopolitics, a modern update of Michel Foucault’s panopticon.
Let me put the answers and solutions as I see it very simply.
I do not trust nor support any current or previous parties, and I will never trust them, even if they co-opt our language and rhetoric, even if they say exactly what we’d want to hear. I will never rally behind any legacy politician, even if they're independent. Mohamed Nasheed, Abdulla Yameen, Ibu Solih, Mohamed Muizzu, Maumoon Abdul Gayyoom; I regard them all the same. I will never support a legacy party even if they adopt new leaders, for they could simply feign allyship.
I will not even support new parties or independents unless they clearly and thoroughly demonstrate not only an understanding of our broken system, but also a solid thought-out comprehension of what changes are needed to disarm ruling elites and how to enact these policies well. I’m not going to vote for someone new just because they happen to be independent.
I see no reason to applaud the MDP and Nasheed for simply helping the elites adapt to the new geopolitical global theater.
What we have is a political democracy without an economic democracy (i.e., citizen accessibility, presence, and command of production/wealth-generation forces) – popularity contests and cosplaying democracy.
Without an economic democracy, political democracy is meaningless.
And without revolutionary consciousness, economic democracy will never take root.
Mahal Ibrahim Abdulla is a writer, artist, musician, and aspiring social scientist. He works as the managing editor for Moosumi magazine. He is an honours graduate in Politics and Social Policy from the University of Leeds. His goal is to become a researcher – to eventually settle down and live a quiet life. His current research interests are political communication, social psychology, and the degrowth paradigm.
All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of the Maldives Independent. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to editorial@maldivesindependent.com.
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