India will send 'competent tech personnel' to replace military personnel deployed in Maldives

New Delhi: India will send “competent technical personnel” to replace its military personnel deployed in the Maldives in order to continue to operate the aircraft and the helicopters it had provided to the Indian Ocean nation for use for emergency humanitarian needs and medical evacuations from the far-flung islands.

“I would like to say that the present personnel will be replaced by competent Indian technical personnel,” Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), told journalists in New Delhi on Thursday.

India has agreed to start withdrawing its military personnel deployed in the Maldives by March 10 and complete the process by May 10.

Though Jaiswal did not specify, sources said that while President Mohamed Muizzu’s government in Malé had asked New Delhi to withdraw its military personnel from the Maldives, it had also suggested that the ‘aviation platforms’ provided by India could continue to be used for providing humanitarian services and conducting medical evacuation in the archipelago.

The Muizzu government had initially stated that India had 77 military personnel in the Maldives. It later updated the count to 88. Most of them are deployed to operate and fly the Dornier aircraft and two Advanced Light Helicopters gifted by India to the Maldives for emergency evacuation of people from the remote islands.

The ‘high-level core group’ set up by two governments to discuss the issue had its second meeting in New Delhi on February 2. The meeting saw the two sides agreeing on “a set of mutually workable solutions to enable continued operation of Indian aviation platforms that provide humanitarian and medevac (medical evacuation) services to the people of (the) Maldives”, according to a press release issued by the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India after the meeting. It, however, did not refer to any timeline for the withdrawal of the military personnel.

“Both sides agreed that the Government of India will replace the military personnel in one of the three aviation platforms by 10 March 2024, and will complete replacing military personnel in the other two platforms by 10 May 2024,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of the Maldives stated in a press release issued in Malé.

Muizzu’s campaign for the presidential polls in September 2023 saw him opposing and promising to reverse his predecessor Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s ‘India First’ policy of treating India as a preferred partner for the Maldives and lessening its reliance on China.

He kept his poll promise and formally asked India to withdraw all its military personnel from the Maldives immediately after taking oath on November 17.

However, during his meeting with India’s union minister Kiren Rijiju a day after being sworn in, the new president of the Maldives, however, acknowledged the role of India’s military personnel and the aviation platforms in humanitarian services and emergency evacuation of people from the remote islands of the Maldives.

Rijiju represented the Government of India at the swearing-in ceremony of Muizzu.