Islamabad/New Delhi (TIP): On a three-day visit to Pakistan, Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu met the who’s who of the Islamic Republic. He met everyone from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Deputy PM Ishaq Dar to the powerful army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir. Muizzu even donned a robe to receive an honorary doctorate from an Islamic university.
The three-day state visit, from October 20 to 22, saw the Maldives and Pakistan sign 20 agreements covering defence, maritime security, policing, trade and other sectors. Muizzu called for reviving the largely dormant South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), whose last summit was held in Kathmandu in 2014. His meeting with Pakistan’s powerful army chief has added a strategic dimension to the diplomatic outreach. The developments have raised questions about whether the Indian Ocean island nation is moving closer to Islamabad, and what that means for New Delhi.
The international waters around the Maldives, located along vital Indian Ocean shipping routes, have traditionally been within New Delhi’s immediate strategic neighbourhood and its sphere of influence. India maintained military personnel in the archipelago to operate and maintain aircraft used for humanitarian assistance and medical evacuations, but Muizzu’s government secured their replacement with civilian technical personnel in May 2024.
The outreach to Pakistan comes against the backdrop of tensions with India, stoked by Muizzu himself, who rode the “India Out” campaign to power in 2023 but has since been working to repair the strained bilateral relationship.
At a joint press conference on Wednesday (October 22), Muizzu said, “The Maldives firmly believes in the value of Saarc, and in the tremendous potential of our region to address shared challenges through collective action.” He also declared that Pakistan and the Maldives had agreed to “turn a new leaf, to build a new era of partnership on the foundations of our six decades of friendship”. Pakistan, meanwhile, used Muizzu’s visit to raise its own disputes with India. According to an October 21 statement from Pakistan’s Press Information Department, Sharif shared Islamabad’s perspectives on Jammu and Kashmir and the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), although Muizzu did not publicly endorse either position.
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