How hiccups to Anglo-Mauritius pact on Chagos have consequences for India too – Firstpost

First, no one expected it to happen when it did. Now, when everyone expects it to work, it seems to be caught in a roadblock of sorts. Last October’s Anglo-Mauritius MoU for the erstwhile British colonial masters to transfer ownership, though not possession, of the Chagos Island to the archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean is now going through revisions and renegotiations, stirring a minor convulsion in the British polity.

At the centre of it is the post-MoU change of elected government in Port Louis, the Mauritian capital. The previous government of Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth had signed the MoU against a front-loaded lease amount of nine million pounds sterling for 99 years. With this, the UK sought to end the six-decade-long Chagos ownership dispute and obtained the (continued) right to lease out the Diego Garcia military base to the US, as the supposed ‘co-developer’, if that is the term.

Now, the new government of post-poll Prime Minister Navind Ramgoolam in Mauritius has sought to modify the MoU before entering into a full-fledged agreement. Though official word is not out from either side, the media in the two countries have claimed that Mauritius wants to double the lease amount to provide for inflation. It also wants to cut down the lease period to 40 years, not 90.

Sell-out or what?

White Hall has mostly maintained silence after the initial jubilation when the MoU was signed. However, the opposition Conservative Party leaders in the UK have begun targeting the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling the new proposal a ‘sell-out’. However, select officials have told the British media that they had not agreed to the new proposal from Mauritius and do not even want to acknowledge media-cited figures in this regard. If nothing else, it was not a ‘sell-out’, unnamed sources were quoted as saying.

How the issue pans out remains to be seen, especially until after US President Donald Trump, now in his second and more unpredictable term than the first as far as America’s global ties and priorities go. The reasons are not far to seek. The foremost among them relates to Diego Garcia, which the UK gave on a 50-year lease to the US for building the military base in the midst of the Indian Ocean at the height of the Cold War. The lease was extended by another 20 years, giving some hope to Mauritius and the Chagossians that their claims would be addressed in the meantime.

The lease extension came about in the midst of the continuing legal tangle over the ownership of the Chagos archipelago, after about a thousand ‘forcibly displaced’ Chagossians took it up with the British judicial system and that of the EU on ownership and human rights violations. The former, expectedly, favoured the British line for most parts. The latter took a humane and humanitarian part when the UK was a member of the EU. Of course, the Chagos issue was not the key over which London quit the Brussels-based European conglomerate, if it was/is one. The Chagossians have been running from pillar to post to have their rights executed on the ground but to no avail.

In between, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, acting on a Mauritian petition, gave an ‘advisory opinion’ for the UK to transfer back the ownership of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius. The UNGA also voted in favour of Mauritius when it discussed the ICJ opinion. It is unclear why the ICJ should have taken the middle path to declare that it was only an ‘advisory opinion’ and not a full-fledged order. Either way, the ICJ, unlike courts under the civil laws of nations, does not have any enforcement mechanism, barring the UNGA.

Chinese influence

The second US-related angle to the larger issue came up after Trump’s election last November. Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice for the Secretary of State—both are in office, since—had declared that the new US administration would not approve of any status quo, as it impinged on American security. In particular, Rubio pointed to the ‘growing influence’ of China in the region. If he had known India’s counter-measures in this regard in the immediate IOR abutting the nation’s shores, Rubio did not seem to have taken note of it.

New Delhi, according to some Western and Indian media reports, has developed a coast guard port and airstrip for the Mauritian armed forces on the Agalega Atoll group of two tiny islands, 1100 km northeast of the mainland and 3,000 km from the nearest Indian shore. Likewise, reports have been claiming that New Delhi has been negotiating the setting up of a tiny base for the Seychelles armed forces on Assumption Island.

Independent of such establishments on the mouth of the Indian Ocean leading up to India and nearer neighbours, Maldives and Sri Lanka, New Delhi has also been developing tri-service bases in the Andaman and Lakshadweep groups, on either side of the mainland. Even without China in mind, India had created the headquarters of the Southern Naval and Air Force commands, respectively in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, both in southern Kerala, looking out into the vast seas and standing by to secure other strategic installations in southern Tamil Nadu, like the Koodankulam atomic power plant, using Russian technology, and the home-grown Liquid Propulsion Centre of ISRO, the nation’s very successful space outfit, at Mahendragiri, again in the land’s end.

Proud, unpredictable

For now, both the British and Mauritian governments are agreeing on waiting for Trump’s America to have its word in the matter. Both, especially Mauritius, have said that they did not expect any major reservations to the ongoing deal negotiations emanating from the White House or Pentagon. Between Trump’s election in November and the inauguration on 20 January, they had tried to fast-track the MoU-based negotiations and hand over a full agreement as a fait accompli for the ‘MAGA’ US to give its nod without second thoughts or reservations.

It is unclear if the decision not to rush through the agreement was caused by the slow pace of the negotiations, which was riddled with new clauses, as proposed by Mauritius. Nor is it known if the two nations agreed that they could not and should not make the greater power in the US feel cheated or even taken for granted—not so, when an excessively proud and even more unpredictable Trump was in charge.

There are other issues too. All negotiations between Mauritius and the UK have kept the displaced Chagossians out of the deal. Though they are few or fewer in numbers than when they began in the sixties, and more so, the number of committed ones among them at present, theirs is an issue, a ‘right’ that cannot be circumvented through bilateral agreements between nations.

Even without it, prior to the MoU with the UK, successive Mauritian governments had repeatedly reiterated that they had no problem signing a separate lease deed with the US for Diego Garcia, but they wanted the ownership of all of the Chagos Archipelago transferred to their nation, from and by the colonial masters. They do not agree to the British contention that they had paid upfront for taking possession of Diego Garcia a long time ago. According to them, that agreement did not also cover all of the Chagos Archipelago.

Maldivian angle

There is another side light to it all. During the regime of previous Maldivian President Ibrahim ‘Ibu’ Solih, Male announced the withdrawal of claims over Chagos that had been pending before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the dispute-settlement mechanism under UNCLOS, headquartered respectively in Hamburg, Germany, and Montego Bay, Jamaica. President Solih also wrote to Prime Minister Jugnauth in Port Louis about the Maldivian decision.

Owing mainly to domestic political considerations and electoral pressures, Solih’s rivals in Maldives cried foul and called his unsolicited move a ‘sell-out’ (not necessarily to Mauritius but to India, whose shadow they liked to see in every move of the government of the day). Included in the list of Solih’s critics in the matter was successor President Mohamed Muizzu.

Local critics of the Solih decision, including sea-law luminaries like former attorney-general Mohamed Munavvar, have been saying that the Maldivian claims to Chagos were legit. While this is contestable, especially after a legit government under President Solih had negated the same, there is nothing to show that the latter’s failure in his re-election bid had anything to do with the Opposition’s criticism over Chagos or their larger campaign against India. In particular, critics had argued that the ‘sell-out’ over Chagos would deny southern Mauritius fishermen free access to the adjoining seas.

Since coming to power in November 2023, Muizzu has referred to Chagos ownership and Solih’s decision on more than one occasion, but not anything in recent times. He had written to the British government in the matter, but his presidency has declined to disclose the details of the missive. Now that the fast-tracked Anglo-Mauritian agreement has hit a roadblock, it also remains to be seen if the current government in Maldives would make any fresh move.

With problems galore on the economic front, it is anybody’s guess if Muizzu would want to take more when his government can ill afford to antagonise friends and neighbours. There is also the hidden danger that any such move by him would be seen as Maldives batting not just for itself but for the ubiquitous Chinese underwriter and eternal troublemaker in India’s neighbourhood.

How the US, especially under Trump, would see it or want to see it will be another question that should bother, or should be bothering, the Muizzu dispensation. After all, if push comes to shove, and Maldives has to expect aid from the IMF to tide over the looming fiscal crisis, the leadership needs to remember the conventional thinking that independent of whoever is in power, the US will have the last say, though not always the last laugh.

In this background, the neighbourhood waters could become choppy for India, given the inherent and inherited complexities and also the evolving situation flowing from the deadlocked Anglo-Mauritius pact on Chagos. After all, the simple bilateral question is not as simple when seen from the geo-strategic and geo-political developments of the coming months and years. India, as the leading light of the region, has everything to gain or lose—and cannot afford to miss a beat, especially in reading the same and acting/reacting accordingly!

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.