China has changed the equation for India’s neighbours. New Delhi can’t neglect them anymore

It's hardly surprising that Maldives has played the China card. This is the kind of self-interested behaviour that India frequently invokes with Russia or Iran.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu | Image via X/@presidencymv

Elections in three countries in India’s neighbourhood and the mixed results illustrate both their growing importance to Indian security and some of the difficult choices that India faces. The contretemps with the Maldives illustrates this very well, but New Delhi should stay the course on its relatively more pragmatic approach and ignore the silliness of India’s loudmouthed social media warriors.

Difficulties with smaller neighbours are not peculiar to India but afflict all large powers to varying degrees. To an important degree, these are new problems for India precisely because one of these variables has changed. In China, India’s neighbours now have an extra-regional power that is both able and willing to use the neighbourhood against India.

Most countries worry the most about their neighbours. This is natural because neighbours are more likely to be able to harm you. Generally, countries farther away aren’t as much of a worry because, even if there are disagreements, they may not have the wherewithal to attack directly simply because of distance. Though they can cause other harm—think of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—these pale in comparison to direct attack and other forms of coercive tactics, including terrorism.

Of course, one exception to this is great powers, which can project their power much farther than their immediate neighbours and even their immediate neighbourhood. Indeed, one criterion for being considered a great power is the capacity to project such power beyond your own borders.

The ‘great power’ worry

One reason why India was and is able to play an extra-regional political role is that, although important, its neighbours aren’t strong enough to threaten India. This frees India from immediate neighbourhood worries, despite Pakistan. At best, India’s smaller neighbours so far have been more a nuisance than a serious security risk. Moreover, there were no great powers interested and/or with the capacity to use these smaller neighbours against India. This needs a bit of elaboration because the standard narrative in India is of a country that has consistently been undermined by global powers, which is not entirely true.

Of the three relevant great powers, the Soviet Union was never an issue. After the ideologically straitjacket of the Stalin years, the Soviet Union decided that its global interests were better served by partnering with many of the notable developing powers such as India, rather than seeking to foster communist revolutions in these countries. Though Soviet behaviour with India was much more complex and self-serving than some in India would like to believe, they rarely sought to counter India, with their outreach to Pakistan in the late 1960s being a minor exception.

The US did periodically engage in policies that hurt Indian interests, especially during the Nixon presidency and indeed through much of the 1970s and 1980s. But contrary to Indian hyper-nationalist rhetoric, India was not the target of such policies even if it was often the victim. Under Nixon, for example, from the perspective of the White House, India got in the way of their major geopolitical strategy of reaching out to China, just as in the Reagan administration, India became the victim of Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan. It can be argued that this is a distinction without a difference except the difference does matter in the context of great powers who can help smaller states counter the regional heavyweight. Pakistan did astutely manage to leverage US global strategy to counter India, but Washington’s disinterest in such objectives meant that this was always a relatively limited effort.

China is the other great power that was a potential candidate for intervention in the region to counter India. And it did. In 1965, China attempted to divert Indian military focus on the western front against Pakistan with trumped-up and patently absurd controversies along the Tibet border. India ignored it, and the ploy failed. China did not even attempt any such diversion in 1971 because the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, was incapable of presenting any credible diversion to Indian forces. Beijing simply stuck to UNSC resolutions, which in any case went nowhere because of Moscow’s veto.

Thus, while the Soviet Union and the US had little interest in helping India’s neighbours counter India, China had the willingness but not the capability. This has now changed. China, whose interest in countering India within the South Asian region never flagged, now has the material capacity to support India’s small neighbours. This is one of the consequences of China’s growing wealth and power. As much as the stronger military power that China represents, it also represents a political challenge in many respects, including in this way within the region.

China changed the game

Responding to this challenge is not easy. For many decades, India could treat its smaller neighbours with relatively benign neglect—or worse—because New Delhi knew they could do little about it. Lacking any capacity to do anything directly against India—Pakistan being an exception—their weakness also made them unattractive to external great powers that had the capacity to help them. Now that they can look to China, the situation is very different.

That smaller countries such as the Maldives or others would be tempted to play the China card should not be surprising. It is logical, rational, and represents the kind of self-interested behaviour that New Delhi frequently invokes, such as in its relationship with Russia or Iran. Responding to such strategic ploys by Male with hyper-nationalism is irrational, useless, and counterproductive. Thankfully, this has been largely confined to India’s media and social media warriors from whom nuance is hardly to be expected. Obviously, absurd social media comments by Maldivian officials need to be countered, and the official Indian response was largely the correct one. It was a self-goal by Male that put it on the defensive, and official New Delhi’s relatively restrained reaction underlined this fact.

But it is also not in the interest of these small neighbours to entirely align with one side or the other, irrespective of what Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu might say. Even if India, as the proximate power, might represent a greater physical danger than distant China, the primary strategic purpose of these small states is to play India and China off against each other so that they can benefit most from the competition. What this means is that India needs to play this game too, knowing the strategic opportunistic imperatives driving the smaller states as well as their limits. One of these limits is that they live in India’s neighbourhood, which means there are limits that they recognise to how much they can play such games. They cannot, for example, antagonise India beyond a point because there are quite serious punishments that India can impose on them.

This is something that official New Delhi does appear to get, even if Indian social media warriors don’t. India has gotten much better at listening to its neighbours and supporting their development aspirations, to mention only one aspect. Equally, not all domestic political developments in the region are going to go India’s way, but that does not mean that the game is over. New Delhi should continue its patient and nuanced strategy that is working better than idiotic ideas like cancelling tourist bookings.

The author is a professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He tweets @RRajagopalanJNU. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)