The Maldives government on Tuesday defended the arrest of former president Mohamed Nasheed.
"You can change friends but not neighbours," Atal Bihari Vajpayee famously said this 15 years ago.
Maldives Supreme Court has ordered the suspension of the run-off presidential re-vote scheduled for Sunday, a day after former president Mohammed Nasheed led the first round but failed to clinch an outright majority.
Voting was held in Maldives on Saturday for the second multi-party presidential elections with long queues of people outside polling stations in this Indian Ocean archipelago, which has seen a series of unsettling political events in the last eighteen months.
Democracy in Maldives is at the crossroads. There is need for the international community to put pressure on the incumbent regime in the country, so that it is not able to disrupt elections once again, and the democracy in Maldives could be saved from sinking, says Anand Kumar.
Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency on Wednesday as angry protesters stormed the prime minister's office in Colombo, hours after president Gotabaya Rajapksa fled to the Maldives on a military jet, amid the country's worst economic crisis in decades.
'Agreements signed between the Maldives and China have seriously worried India.'
In this exclusive conversation with Rediff.com contributor Rajeev Sharma, exiled opposition leader Ahmed Naseem explains why the world should care about democracy in Maldives.
Maldives on Tuesday voiced its 'hurt' at Prime Minister Modi not visiting it
The unstated aim of a well-publicised airlift operation of this kind is to demonstrate India's ability to rapidly move troops and equipment over long distances.
Would it serve India's interest to go to war with China over the Maldives, asks Aditi Phadnis.
New Delhi has reached out to neighbours like seldom before while singling Islamabad for criticism at international forums.
Maldives on Friday affirmed that the controversy-ridden presidential polls set for Saturday will go ahead in order to avert a constitutional crisis.
'Of course, Maldives is chicken feed for the Indian armed forces. And an intervention in the Maldives may serve the purpose of creating jingoism in an election year.' 'But from the foreign policy perspective, any such move will be a flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter,' warns Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
George Joseph
We salute the Mi-8 today on the occasion of the 32nd anniversary of Operation Cactus. Through its glorious service career, the Mi-8 left an indelible mark on the future by providing the IAF with a lineage of professional helicopter aircrew, says Air Commodore Nitin Sathe (retd).
'Without doubt, General Bajwa has deliberately snubbed India.' 'But why did he do that?' 'The Male leadership is simply fed up with Indian interference,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
The realist school of thought currently employed by Delhi, that friendships don't matter as long as national interest is taken care of, is all very well to pursue, except in this case Nasheed exemplified both friendship and national interest. After its errors of judgement on the Maldives, India's next opportunity will come only when elections are held.
'I am also concerned over Chinese ambitions in the Maldives and wider Indian Ocean,' former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed tells Rediff.com contributor Rajeev Sharma in an exclusive interview.
Blackmail on one side and bullying on the other doesn't make for a constructive partnership, says Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
'Now is the time for India, our biggest neighbour and oldest friend, to bring the full array of international policy instruments to bear.'
This is the first time that the Maldives government has acknowledged that compensation has to be paid to GMR.
'India should think big: About how in a multi-polar world, India can indeed be one of the poles, rather than being a secondary power that has to worry about 'alignment' with one of the poles. A G3 in other words, India should look to getting others to align with itself rather than the US or China,' says Rajeev Srinivasan.
