Last week, Dennis Faure, President of the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles, announced the cancellation of an agreement with India, under which the Indian government was to build a military facility for the Seychelles Coast Guard on the island of Assumption. The agreement was discussed during the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 and a formal agreement was signed between the two nations in January 2018. 

Faure’s announcement, which came a few days before he visited India, was extremely embarrassing for his hosts. New Delhi had been proclaiming the strategic importance of military cooperation with the Seychelles, which is located in close proximity to a key trade route.

The pushback in the Seychelles could have been dismissed as an odd development, but it is just the latest in a series of setbacks that India has received in its immediate neighborhood. Just a few days before Faure’s announcement, the Seychelles’ Indian Ocean island neighbor, the Maldives, had asked India to take back a helicopter that its navy had positioned in the country as part of a program for training the Maldivian Coast Guard. Earlier in the year, the Maldives had already asked India to take away another helicopter provided for the same purpose. With the withdrawal of both helicopters, India would also be pulling out the handful of its naval officers who were based in the Maldives for maintenance and training purposes. 

India’s ties with the Maldives have indeed taken a severe beating in the last few years, with each new development pushing relations toward a new low. The troubles began in 2012, when then-President Mohammed Nasheed was forced to resign by a group of protesters. India misread the situation and thought it could do business with the incoming leader, Abdulla Yameen, the half-brother of previous President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who was very close to India and had even sought Indian military intervention to quash an attempted coup in 1988.

For almost two years, India seemed to be straddling two boats — supporting Nasheed, but not forcefully enough, thus leaving Yameen in power. Yameen’s sense of insecurity with India, however, kept on growing and he began developing closer ties with India’s bete noire, Pakistan, and eventually China. Since 2017, India seems to have lost a lot of ground in the Maldives, as the Chinese jumped in and have promised billions of dollars in investment and loans as part of the One Belt One Road Initiative, to which India remains stringently opposed.

Encouraged by China’s support, Yameen has gone on to squash democracy entirely and imprison some Supreme Court judges and his opponents. He has also been more strident in his rejection of India’s concerns. By asking India to withdraw its helicopters (and the military personnel), he has literally shown New Delhi the door.

India’s relations with yet another small neighbor, Nepal, have also been seesawing over the last few years. India’s strong-armed interference during the drawing up and adoption of a new Nepalese constitution and the subsequent elections was ostensibly to protect the interests of the Indian-origin Madhesi people living in the foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas. In 2015, protesting Madhesis blocked a strategic bridge between the two countries that accounts for over 60 percent of trade that Nepal has with India. The blockade brought goods traffic to a complete halt for several months and deprived Nepal of supplies of essential goods such as fuel and medicines.

The Nepalese government accused India of being tacitly involved in the blockade and said it was New Delhi’s way of showing its disapproval of the Nepalese government. Though India denied any involvement, the country’s image took a severe beating in Nepal and pushed the latter even closer to China, much to the discomfort of the Modi government.

 India’s relations with Pakistan, always difficult to predict and handle, have also nosedived in the past four years.

Ranvir S. Nayar

Nearly three years on, India’s ties with Nepal remain strained and there are increasing signs of a Nepalese embrace of China. It was visible during a recent visit to Kathmandu by Modi, where the social media chatter was loaded with demands that the Indian PM apologize for the 2015 blockade; a sharp contrast to the adoring crowds that had gathered for his earlier visit in 2014.

India’s relations with Pakistan, always difficult to predict and handle, have also nosedived in the past four years. The expectation was that a strong government led by a right-wing leader in India would be able to get relations with Pakistan back on track. However, the two countries have broken off all discussions, while their armies continue to exchange fire and shelling on the border with increasing regularity.

Soon after taking charge, Modi had proclaimed “neighborhood first” as the key element of his foreign policy and he invited the leaders of all the neighboring nations to his inauguration. However, he quickly seemed to forget this. In the last four years, Modi has made 40 overseas trips and traveled to nearly 55 countries, some as far off as Brazil and Fiji. Most of these visits were made in an attempt to project India as an emerging superpower and to also push up his own international ratings, at least in the view of the Indian diaspora in these nations.

However, somewhere in the midst of these incessant travels to distant lands, Modi seems to have lost the view of India’s immediate neighborhood. With less than a year to go before the end of his term, Modi now seems to have finally realized the need for and the importance of building fences with India’s neighbors and has travelled to China twice and Nepal recently. 

However, it remains to be seen whether, in the few months that remain before the next elections, Modi can undo the damage caused by four years of misguided decisions and, at times, pure ignorance of India’s neighbors.

  • Ranvir S. Nayar is managing editor of Media India Group, a global platform based in Europe and India, which encompasses publishing, communication, and consultation services.