Clearly angered by the decision of the Madives government to terminate the $500 million worth airport deal with the GMR group, India has warned that the move could have a debilitating effect on bilateral ties. Further, India has accused the archipelago’s government of taking a decision motivated by political reasons rather than commercial ones.
A fuming New Delhi also warned that the decision, announced on Tuesday, could affect future investments by Indian companies in the Maldives. Official sources said on Thursday: “ When the single largest investment by an Indian company is sees an agitation and a political issue is made out of it, it definitely sends extremely negative signals to Indian investors.”
Taken aback by the decision of President Mohamed Waheed’s government to end GMR’s 25-year lease of the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport (INIA) in Male, sources said “the development is extremely unfortunate” and “likely to affect the attitude of investors worldwide” towards investing in the archipelago. For now, New Delhi has also said that with the matter “ in a legal process. the legal process should play itself out”.
Regarding bilateral relations, sources when asked if these would be buffeted by the deal’s abrupt termination remarked, “it’s inevitable that it will”.
Sources also said that the Indian government has conveyed to the government of the Maldives that a climate wherein the airport deal issue was being used as a “ lever to acquire political power” was not a matter that it took lightly.
Incidentally, general elections in the archipelago are less than a year away. they have to be held by October 2013 but it’s expected that the country could go to the polls as early as July.
Official sources here noted: It (the GMR deal) would appear that it has somehow got mixed up with the planning for the next elections” and thus the matter has become an “election issue”.
What appears to have got New Delhi’s goat also is that fact that just some months ago, president Waheed while on a visit to New Delhi had assured Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the GMR deal was “a matter that needed to be negotiated and resolved”.