After a heated presidential poll campaign for much of last year, Maldives is now gearing up for the equally important parliamentary elections on 17 March. Nominations have already opened and political parties are still in the process of finalising their candidates’ lists, mainly through primaries. The total number of seats is higher at 93, up from the present 87, following mandatory de-limitation between elections. President Mohamed Muizzu and his ‘ruling’ PNC-PPM combine is badly in need of at least a simple majority, though a two-thirds majority is the preferred result, as his government does not enjoy either at present, despite the en masse defection by 13 Opposition MDP parliamentarians, recently.

The Opposition’s impeachment initiative, even if cleared by the Supreme Court, will have to be a combo, including Vice-President Hussain Mohamed Latheef, as under the Constitution, the latter gets to complete the former’s term when the presidency falls vacant – as in the US, for instance. Only the impeachment can ensure fresh elections to the presidency all over again, with the Parliament Speaker standing in for 60 days – which is what the Opposition seems to be keen on, based on their perceptions of the changed public mood in the two-plus months of Muizzu’s presidency.

MDP’s Mohamed Aslam, who was the running-mate of defeated incumbent President Ibrahim ‘Ibu’ Solih, is the Speaker at present. Like the Opposition’s idea of an impeachment motion against President Muizzu, the ruling combine too has decided to move no-confidence motions against the incumbent and his Deputy, Ahmed Saleem.  Both expulsions require a simple majority unlike those for the nation’s top two posts, where it is a two-thirds vote.

However, for all four motions, they need to serve a 14-day notice with a parliamentary panel formally clearing them before a full-house debate and vote, where those named would also have the right to defend themselves. Incidentally, Maldives does not have an anti-defection law, and this may have come as a saving for successive presidents and their parties to engineer floor-crossing from other parties, both allies and adversaries.

‘Apologise to India’

Though the Opposition got the impeachment rules amended, it held back, given the popular mood that the elected leader should be given time to settle down and try and prove his mettle. In their reckoning, Muizzu’s patently anti-India foreign and security policies, in particular, have unnerved many voters. These voters, according to some, were in favour of having Indian boots out, but not India, per se.

To them, Muizzu’s un-debated decision to import rice, flour and other essential staples from distant Turkey and also pharmaceutical products from Europe and the US came as a bolt from the blue. Compared to India, the distance from Turkey too has introduced an element of uncertainty in the regularity of supplies and an inevitable hike in the price, transportation and insurance costs for these goods – and the possibility of the government passing them on to the Maldivian consumer.

Like some of his poll financiers from within the country, Muizzu seems to be stuck with the forgotten idea of prime minister Ibrahim Nasir – later President – who in the previous century found it convenient to brand the Bohra traders from Bombay, now Mumbai, as cheats and denied massive payments due to them for supplying essential staples without break. It is not unlikely that in his time, jailed former president Abdulla Yameen, Muizzu’s estranged mentor, who otherwise is pragmatic, thought it expedient that his ‘India Out / India Military Out’ campaign would work while in the Opposition.

Anyway, the average Maldivian does not seem to approve of Muizzu’s determined efforts to alienate India at all costs. It sounds more personal and is seen as being guided by an unseen arm that is not Maldivian.  In context, they are aware that China-funded ‘white elephant development schemes’ do not provide the much-needed white-collar jobs in tens of thousands but the long-term costs of Chinese debt could be back-breaking as neighbouring Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans found to their dismay, not very long ago.  They are also awaiting an official clarification on the cost of the imports from Turkey for the consumer and /or the nation, which governments tend to pass on to the consumer, in one form or the other.

The Maldivian people, including many in Muizzu’s core conservative constituency that is not per se anti-India, too are unconvinced about his Republic Day message to President Draupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his message, Muizzu ‘underscored the Maldives-India bond nurtured by centuries of friendship, mutual respect and a deep sense of kinship’. However, the Maldivian street opinion is that Muizzu is doing much more than even Yameen, his estranged mentor, to upset the Indian apple cart and almost for good. Simply put, they are not for it, now or ever. Most of them had thought that he would stop insisting on the withdrawal of unarmed Indian troops sent to operate aerial platforms.

Sensing the popular mood, or so it seems businessman-politician Gasim Ibrahim, founder of the Jumhooree Party (JP) and at present an ally of Muizzu’s PNC-PPM coalition, has publicly asked the president to apologise to India and Prime Minister Modi for his unnamed accusations, dubbing India as a ‘bully’.  He is silent on the ‘Boycott Maldives’ call in India, which upset most Maldivians, especially Indian celebrities popular in the country joined the chorus.

Simultaneously, Gasim has told the MDP that their bid to impeach the President was akin to ‘kicking’ the will of the people. Speaker of the Special Majlis that drafted the current Democracy Constitution, 2008, Gasim, whose peak acceptance level stood at a high 25 per cent in Elections 2013, has his thumb on the pulse of the people, especially those that are less fortunate and less urbanised.  When Gasim thus asked Muizzu to restore ‘diplomatic reconciliation through a formal apology to mend bilateral relations’, he seemed willing to risk the Majlis poll alliance, too.

Accidental president

It is unwise for Team Muizzu to conclude that his mandate was near-exclusively for his poll-time anti-India calls. Instead, it was an anti-Solih vote, both in terms of performance, and his unwillingness to accept that he was only a stand-in for Nasheed, friend, philosopher and political guide after laws prohibited the latter from contesting the 2018 presidential election as a prisoner in self-exile.  Like Solih earlier, Muizzu too is seen only as an ‘accidental President’ after the Supreme Court upheld the EC’s bar on Yameen contesting the presidential poll from prison, pending his prolonged appeal in the High Court. For many ‘non-committal voters’ who preferred Muizzu over Solih last year, political loyalty remains a touchstone for personal integrity in public life.

Otherwise, nemesis seems to have caught up with the Maldivian polity that is still tottering like a toddler even 15 years later – that too under a succession of faltering Presidents. To be fair, both Yameen (2013-18) and Solih (2018-23) had a full majority in Parliament, yet they seemed eternally unstable. Yameen, for instance, proclaimed an internal emergency thrice in five years while Solih with a brutal majority of 65 MPs out of a total of 87, was constantly in eternal fencing mode with Nasheed, whose impact was felt both within and outside Parliament, as never before.

Even without it, the current Maldivian situation is reminiscent of a repeat of past events under a democratic structure. The much-talked-about scuffle among MPs the other day that the international media, including India’s, highlighted has a parallel from 2012 when the Nasheed-Solih combo’s MDP parliamentarians created unprecedented ruckus and would not allow incumbent Mohamed Waheed to deliver his customary presidential address.

Likewise, after Wednesday’s bloody assault on Prosecutor-General Hussain Shameem, an inherited nominee from the Solih presidency, in broad daylight in an open street, the MDP charged the government with protecting ‘Male gangs’, which political detractors often identified with Yameen. While police investigations alone would help identify the attackers, weapons and motive(s), the predecessor Solih government too cannot escape the blame for failing to unravel the brain behind the terror attack on Nasheed, on the evening of 6 May 2021.

In this background of administrative lethargy, including police laxity, and also political one-upmanship, Muizzu’s accusations against the MDP for denying confirmation to his ministerial nominees has its echo in the then DRP-PA majority, forerunner to his PNC-PPM alliance, voting out a few of President Nasheed’s re-appointees after Vice-President Mohamed Waheed (later, President) declined to join others in an en masse resignation calculated to force an early presidential poll in 2010. Not to create yet another stalemated situation, he did not re-nominate those whom Parliament had voted out – if only to tell him as to whom between the Executive President and Parliament was supreme.

Muizzu seems adamant or determined as he has post-haste re-nominated the three ministers whom Parliament had voted out. Confirmation for them would have to involve more defections. It may not go down well with the voters on the eve of the parliamentary elections. With party tickets already distributed only those Opposition MPs who are not contesting or unsure of victory may be interested in cross-over, whatever the price – for Maldivian democracy, that is.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.