Bharat Rakshak

Malaysian government owned MAHB holds 23 per cent, while GMR holds 77 per cent stake in GMR Male International Airport Pvt Ltd, a joint venture formed for developing Ibrahim Nasir International Airport in Maldives.

Bade wrote:
Short of outright invasion and overt coup with full Indian support what do you propose to deal with Maldives looming into a military threat. .

Bade wrote:Let's say tomorrow GoI wakes up from its claimed slumber and publishes a white paper which says it is Islamism at fault for all our issues. What next then ? Sit and twiddle or send the white paper dossier to all embassies of friendly countries and wait for their co-operation. Stating the obvious to every tom dick and harry in the world or on this forum is not going to change anything on the ground.

Bade wrote:Let's say tomorrow GoI wakes up from its claimed slumber and publishes a white paper which says it is Islamism at fault for all our issues. What next then ? Sit and twiddle or send the white paper dossier to all embassies of friendly countries and wait for their co-operation. Stating the obvious to every tom dick and harry in the world or on this forum is not going to change anything on the ground.

RamaY wrote:Kindly throw some light.

AbhiJ wrote:

Bade wrote:Let's say tomorrow GoI wakes up from its claimed slumber and publishes a white paper which says it is Islamism at fault for all our issues. What next then ? Sit and twiddle or send the white paper dossier to all embassies of friendly countries and wait for their co-operation. Stating the obvious to every tom dick and harry in the world or on this forum is not going to change anything on the ground.

The time will be where the happenings would be irreversible. Just like lost Afghanistan.

Bade wrote:I do not visit all threads.

But from what I see on the ground I am aware of only a few from Saudis even in KL. Most of GCC hawala types is what is going on in Mumbai, the underworld types. Those GoI can in principle have leverage over if needed, since they make their investments in India to sustain their empires as it is mostly in real estate.

The Indian Ocean has been receiving a fair amount of, admittedly long overdue, attention in recent weeks, with Indian Navy chief D.K. Joshi surprisingly willing to protect India’s fair name and interests in the South China Sea. But with the waters far more agitated in India’s immediate vicinity, in and around the Maldives, the question that remains is: how far Delhi is prepared to go to protect its reputation in a region it has often asserted it is the leader of?

By Saturday morning, armed with justification by the Singapore Supreme Court, the Maldivian government of Mohamed Waheed had revoked the 25-year licence of the Indian infrastructure company GMR, to build and operate a new airport in the Maldivian capital, Male.

India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid sought to distance the impact of the cancellation of the contract from the larger bilateral relationship, arguing that it was the prerogative of the sovereign Maldivian government to do what it wanted, and implying that there was a limit to which New Delhi could defend a commercial enterprise if it got into trouble, even if it were Indian.

Mr. Khurshid’s impeccable, if somewhat helpless, remarks are no doubt lifted straight from the best textbooks on diplomacy. More to the point, at this late stage in the dispute, there was little he could have done without exacerbating the damage already caused to the relationship. The Maldives is so polarised today, between the self-avowedly pro-India former President Mohamed Nasheed and the man who replaced him in February’s bloodless coup, current President Waheed, that there is no way India can appear to take everyone along without taking sides.

Irrespective of ‘isms’, friendships

For some time now India’s diplomatic practice has been geared towards the promotion of a tranquil neighbourhood, where relationships with rulers in those countries must be maintained irrespective of ideology or ‘isms’ or personal friendships.

National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon eloquently put forward this premise while delivering the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture in August 2011, when he veritably laid out a road map for the exercise of power. Actively working towards a “peaceful periphery” was on top of that list, he said, pointing out that India’s several challenges of poverty and disease and illiteracy were best dealt with by a nation undistracted by problems on its borders.

Then he added, prophetically: “To what extent we can become a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and our neighbourhood would depend on how it contributes to India’s own transformation.”

So when the Maldives underwent its own “coup” in February this year — the Maldivian National Defence Forces moved to arrest Mr. Nasheed, who agreed to hand over power hoping to avoid a bloodbath — India recognised the new Waheed government within 24 hours. The Americans and the Chinese quickly followed suit.

China factor

New Delhi argued that the Maldives was far too important to have been left in a power vacuum, implying that the Chinese, India’s greatest rival, would have moved in to take India’s place if it had not acted immediately. Over time, New Delhi would acknowledge that Mr. Nasheed had, indeed, contributed enormously to securing India’s maritime borders by allowing a series of Indian radars to be installed on several Maldivian atolls and islands — a move former Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom had resisted forever — that were also close to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean on which the Americans have had a base for decades. Most importantly, as the Chinese moved to expand their sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean, in Sri Lanka and the Seychelles as well as in the Maldives, India was able to gather a much better idea of what they were now doing.

Clearly, the swift recognition of Mr. Waheed’s government was motivated by the yearning for a “peaceful periphery.” Mr. Gayoom’s daughter, Dunya, was made a junior minister in Mr. Waheed’s government, in implicit recognition of the power and influence her father continued to wield in Maldivian politics. And when he reached a town in South India two months ago, accompanying his wife for health treatment, Mr. Gayoom was invited to meet the powers-that-be in Delhi in the hope that he would continue to push for the restoration of stability in the Maldives.

New Delhi thought it knew Mr. Gayoom; after all in 1988, when Sri Lankan terrorists had tried to overthrow the former leader, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had ordered armed help for the Maldivian leader. Now in 2012, Delhi sought to play all sides — Mr. Waheed, Mr. Gayoom as well as Mr. Nasheed. The latter was hosted in the Indian capital a couple of months ago (at the same time as Bangladesh Opposition leader and former Bangladesh President Gen. H.M. Ershad), while Mr. Menon received Mr. Nasheed’s special adviser Ibrahim Zaki a couple of weeks ago.

Depending on whose side you’re on in this complicated Maldivian saga, the story unfolds accordingly. Mr. Waheed’s men say that Mr. Zaki was arrested on a faraway island some weeks ago because he was doing drugs — a bottle of hash oil was found on his person.

In his defence, Mr. Zaki told this reporter that he had travelled to this faraway island along with other Opposition Maldivian politicians to plot Mr. Waheed’s ouster. They had been in serious discussions all night on the beach, Mr. Zaki said, when Mr. Waheed’s security forces emerged from the water carrying truncheons and proceeded to beat everyone up badly.

Mr. Zaki is believed to have shown his bruises to Mr. Menon in Delhi, who had him sent to a local Delhi doctor for treatment.

Soon enough, the GMR contract had become the perfect instrument for Mr. Waheed to attack Mr. Nasheed, under whose dispensation the $511 million contract had been awarded to the Indian infrastructure major in 2010. In his meeting with GMR president on Friday, Mr. Waheed insisted that “no outside influence” had played a role in the cancellation of the contract, implying that the Chinese had nothing to do with the decision.

Mr. Waheed’s coalition partner, the radical Islamic Adhaalath party, obviously thought otherwise. Last week a party spokesperson tweeted, “We would rather give the airport contract to our friends in China, who now make the majority of our tourist population...With China already based in (the Seychelles), the addition of Maldives as a friend would be a massive blow to future Indian power in this region…. India would lose her reliance on our strategic location and global trade routes. We will seek the assistance of China in this endeavour,” the Adhaalath spokesperson said.

Official position

The official Indian position on the airport fiasco is that the legal process must be pursued to its logical conclusion. The Maldivian attorney general has already stated that compensation would amount to $700 million. Mr. Waheed’s government has said it will not pay a dime, but allow GMR three weeks grace period to leave the country.

As India loses this latest battle for influence in the Indian Ocean, it might be a good time for New Delhi to think long and hard whether it can paint all its neighbours, and the Maldives in particular, with the same brush. Whether or not Mr. Nasheed can be trusted, why Mr. Gayoom is trying to make a comeback and whether Mr. Waheed will be a credible candidate in the presidential elections in mid-2013 through his adroit challenging of India.

Above all, the biggest question remains: is this really India’s ocean?

The Maldives are marketed as a tourist paradise; a chain of idyllic coral islands with golden, palm-fringed beaches, where holidaymakers can bathe undisturbed in the warm, crystal-clear seas of the Indian Ocean.

But that image has been challenged by a series of damning reports by human rights investigators. They accuse the Maldives police service (MPS) of serious, repeated civil rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters, opposition MPs and journalists.

Violence in the Commonwealth nation sharply escalated this year after the forced departure of the Maldives' first democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed, in February. Human rights agencies believe that the alleged coup, and the violence since then, has shattered the islands' slow, fragile journey to democracy.

That conflict, which has reportedly led to the mass detention of 2,000 opposition activists, assaults and arrests of 19 opposition MPs, as well as sexual assaults, torture and the indiscriminate use of pepper sprays – including twice against ex-president Nasheed, has raised significant questions about the role of British police in training and advising the islands' controversial police service.

Opposition groups, Amnesty International and senior officials in the reformist Nasheed government, including the former high commissioner to the UK and the former chair of the Maldives' police integrity commission, have told the Guardian about their serious concerns over the UK's role.

They believe significant contradictions have emerged in the UK's dealings with the Maldives police, which threaten to damage the UK's reputation in south Asia.

Farah Faizal, the former Maldives high commissioner to the UK and a member of the UK-based Friends of the Maldives pressure group, said: "If they've been providing training all these years and the MPS in Maldives are carrying out all these brutal attacks on people then there are obviously questions for them [whether] it is the right training they've been getting."

Opposition activists say the UK has been aware about the police force's troubled reputation for years: senior British officers raised serious anxieties about human rights standards more than five years ago.

After a fact-finding mission in 2007, one senior retired Scottish officer, John Robertson, described the force's special operations command as an "openly paramilitary organisation" and a "macho elite ... most of whom lack basic police training".

In 2009, two senior British officers recruited by British diplomats – Superintendent Alec Hippman of Strathclyde police and a former inspector of constabulary for England, Sir David Crompton, made a series of recommendations to improve policing, after discovering the Maldives police service was poorly equipped for modern policing.

After policing improved during Nasheed's three-year term of office, the MPS has been heavily implicated in the violent, alleged coup when Nasheed was deposed in February this year. He stepped down – alleging that he was forced to at gunpoint – after several days of brutal clashes between the police, the Maldives' military, senior members of Nasheed's Maldives Democratic party and pro-democracy campaigners.

That violence has continued since the alleged coup, raising allegations that the opposition Maldives Democratic party is being suppressed before fresh but unconfirmed elections are due to take place next year.

That alarm intensified after former president Nasheed was arrested in October for allegedly arresting a judge, and ignoring a travel ban and several of his MPs were arrested on a private island for allegedly drinking alcohol.

In July, Amnesty International described the situation there as a "human rights crisis" following "a campaign of violent repression [which] has gripped the country since President Mohamed Nasheed's ousting in February 2012." Its report, The Other Side of Paradise, concluded "there are already signs that the country is slipping back into the old pattern of repression and injustice."

Opposition groups are alarmed that former police officers acting privately and the Scottish Police College (SPC), backed by the Foreign Office, have continued training MPS officers and advising the force during a period of intense political conflict and mounting allegations of human rights abuses.

Faizal said she had been pressing the Foreign Office to take much tougher action on human rights in the islands. "I would hope they would definitely review what they've been doing because somebody has been paying for this: they should dramatically review what they've been doing and they need to tell these people in the MPS if they want to continue their relationship, they must be seen to be policing rather than act like thugs, just going around and beating people.

"They have to be a credit to the Scottish Police College if they do well, but right now, how the MPS is behaving is absolutely shocking."

An investigation by the Guardian has found that Scottish police forces and the SPC have been closely involved in training Maldivian police, including its current commissioner, Abdulla Riyaz, for more than 15 years – when the Maldives were dominated by the unelected, autocratic President Abdul Mamoun Gayoom.

Since then, more than 67 MPS officers have been trained at the college at Tulliallan in Fife, their fees helping the SPC earn millions of pounds of extra income from external contracts. In 2009-10, the college received £141,635 from training MPS officers. The SPC said those fees did not make a profit, but was breakeven income.

The course, a diploma in police management in which human rights was "covered", was taken by 67 Maldives officers. A separate group of MPS officers were also given human rights training in 2011, the college said. At least 10 middle- and senior-ranking Maldives officers are believed to have attended previously.

Links between Scottish and Maldives police began in 1997 when Riyaz and three other officers – then part of the Maldives' military national security force, which ran all internal policing before a civilian police service was set up in 2003, had a five-month visit to Scotland the Highlands and islands.

Seconded to the Northern constabulary, Riyaz spent a month in the Western Isles and four months in Inverness, before taking a postgraduate diploma in alcohol and drugs studies at Paisley University in 1999. That tour of the Highlands was seven years before Gayoom, reacting slowly to pressure from its allies, including the UK government, split up his national security force into a military arm and a civilian police service in 2004. In January 2007, as Gayoom came under growing pressure for democratic reforms, including relinquishing his control over the judiciary, the police and state prosecution service, the SPC signed its open-ended training deal with the MPS.

The Foreign Office admitted it had "serious concerns" about the alleged police brutality and was pressing President Mohammed Waheed Hassan, to tackle the problem but added: "Targeted police capacity-building programmes can lead to increased police professionalism, responsiveness and accountability.

"Although progress is not always swift, we judge that UK engagement can make a positive contribution to consolidation of democracy and respect for human rights."

The Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA), which runs Tulliallan, admitted it does not monitor policing in the Maldives, or check on how its former students perform, and admitted it had no knowledge of the critical report by Robertson from 2007. It said that monitoring links with the Maldives was the Foreign Office's responsibility, through the British high commission in Sri Lanka.

John Geates, the interim chief executive of the SPSA and the former police college director who signed the original deal with the Maldives in 2007, defended its relationship with the force.

"We believe that sharing our wealth of experience and expertise is a positive way of contributing to the development and delivery of fair and effective policing across the world," Geates said.

"We are passionate about showing other police forces how to deliver community policing by consent which, by its nature, means the college does not work with western democracies where that culture and ethos already exists."

Bruce Milne, a former head of training and educational standards at Tulliallan college and retired chief superintendent, now works in the Maldives as a private consultant through his firm Learning & Solutions, but there are differing accounts about his work there.

Milne, who left Tulliallan in June 2010, initially signing a deal to provide training up to degree level with a private corporate security firm set up by Riyaz called Gage Pvt, and an organisation called the Centre for Security and Law Enforcement Studies.

According to Gage's Facebook page, that deal was signed at a famous Maldives tourist resort called Sun Islands in December 2011, when Riyaz was not working for the Maldives police. Formerly an assistant commissioner, Riyaz had been sacked in early 2010 during Nasheed's presidency for alleged fraud. He was reinstated as commissioner in February 2012, after Nasheed was deposed.

Riyaz told the Guardian that the deal signed last December lapsed after he rejoined the police. Milne's company website said his firm "is in the process of forming a partnership with the MPS to create and support the Institute for Security and Law Enforcement Studies (Isles), in affiliation with the Scottish Police College, a world-renowned police training establishment."

The college denied that. It said: "There is no formal affiliation between Learning & Solutions and the SPC in relation to the Maldives."

Milne refused to discuss his dealings with the MPS with the Guardian, but his profile on the social networking site LinkedIn states he has been "responsible for the provision of advise [sic] on organisational development to the Commissioner of Police and to provide assistance and direction in the development of Isles, a professional institute offering competitive education and training for police and security staff in the Maldives".

Superintendent Abdul Mannan, a spokesman for the MPS, denied that Milne was working with the MPS. He said: "Learning & Solution [sic] is working with Police Co-operative Society, a co-operative society registered under the Co-operative Societies Act of Maldives, and not MPS, to deliver a BSc course through Isles.

"Learning and Solutions is one out of the many foreign partner institutions working with Polco to deliver courses through Isles and Polco welcomes all interested parties to work in partnership to help Maldives deliver its security and justice sector training needs."

Mannan said the MPS was committed to improving the force's standards and its human rights record; it now had an internal police standards body that was modernising its policies and procedures. The force was "trying to professionalise the organisation and solid international partners are helping us achieve this goal.

"Everybody, including those groups and individuals claiming to be our friends, wants MPS to achieve this goal to be a professional organisation delivering quality, fair and just service with integrity and openness."

Shahindha Ismail, who resigned as head of the Maldives' police integrity commission in October in protest at the policing crisis, said: "What's happening now is the frontline policemen have the impression they're untouchable, that no one can hold them accountable because their seniors aren't going to. There is so much impunity in what they're doing.

"No one who is interested in working with assisting the MPS can be unaware of the situation in the Maldives," she said. "They should be concentrating on the frontline; they should really be educating these people on basic rights and freedoms and what is also in the constitution of the Maldives."