No journalistic cliché has been left unwritten when it comes to travel stories on the Maldives. “Barefoot luxury,” “stunning views,” and “vanilla soft sands” are all present and correct in the plethora of articles written about this 1,200-strong cluster of islands and its reputation as a “dream” honeymoon destination for A-Listers and other owners of deeper-than-average pockets. Yet the typical “sun-kissed” tourist experience is far removed from the realities of life on the Maldives for locals today—particularly for those who feel less than sanguine about the ruling regime and wish to report on it (or even oppose it).
The lack of transparency associated with the Maldivian government—today’s and those of the recent past—is mirrored by the lack of certainty around the islands’ early history, as Hassan Ahmed Maniku explains in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch. Maniku describes the complete acceptance of Islam by the islands’ people, to the point that no one’s sure what type of spiritual practices existed before Islam’s sweep of the region.
How that happened is difficult to explain, he writes, as “the history of the Maldives is more complex than hitherto recognised.” Islam likely travelled to the region with Arab traders, but the erasure of earlier worship systems was the result of
a series of knotty events entwined with foreign influences bent on the very existence of the small nation as an integral unit. The settlement of the islands of Maldives were started at a period which we cannot date definitely. There is no evidence whatsoever to prove that the settlements were started at a specific period by a known group of colonisers. The theory that the Sinhalese went to the Maldives with their language and religion (Buddhism) cannot be proved conclusively. Being…on the main sailing route, in all probability, Maldives was settled by the earliest navigators in the Indian Ocean. The infusion of the Sinhala element along with Buddhism could certainly be things of a later period. It may be safer to assume that the original settlers were submerged by two separate waves of influences, the Sinhala and the Muslim which swept over the Maldives, perhaps, a thousand years apart, and which combined to give the Maldives a unique and homogeneous cultural identity.
Long periods of rule by Portuguese, Dutch, and finally British colonial occupiers were only fully concluded in 1965, when the Maldives became an Islamic sultanate, albeit one not initially included in the British Commonwealth.
It was as late as the 1980s that the nation’s tourism potential began to be realized under the rule of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Presiding over the Maldives from 1978 to 2008, Gayoom set the tone for the current levels of political repression. According to sociologists Summer Gray and John Foran, writing in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology about the connection between climate justice and the Maldivian struggle for democracy, Gayoom was “an authoritarian, quasi-dictatorial president who displayed a smiling face to the world.” Quoting a 2013 article in The Economist, Gray and Foran position Gayoom as “an autocratic moderniser who made the Maldives the wealthiest corner of South Asia by promoting high-end bikini-and-booze tourism (usually on atolls some distance away from the solidly Muslim local population).”
Free elections were forced upon Gayoom in 2004 after a devastating tsunami. International funding to repair infrastructure was dependent on the political process becoming free and fair in the eyes of foreign observers. This led to formerly imprisoned journalist Mohamed Nasheed winning the presidency in 2008.
Vowing to make the Maldives the first carbon neutral country while improving civil liberties for locals, Nasheed’s administration was stymied from the start by judges who refused to preside over trials against members of the Gayoom regime. The deposed potentates bided their time before striking back in 2012. As Foran and Gray write, on February 7th of that year,
the world’s climate justice and social justice communities woke in shock to the news that Nasheed had “resigned,” and that vice-President Mohamed Waheed was now the President. Within hours, Nasheed and his supporters were seen on the local airwaves being brutally beaten in the streets for protesting what they called a coup d’état.
Nasheed was handed down a thirteen-year prison sentence, subsequently overturned, and has since survived an assassination attempt.
While the internal political situation has heated up, so too has the world’s attention begun to pivot towards the warming and rising of sea levels around the islands, with the recognition that the Maldives may be one of the first countries on Earth to disappear under the effects of climate change.
Ostensibly, recent Maldivian governments have taken their cue from Nasheed in positioning themselves as being in the vanguard of sustainability. In the Summer 2008 issue of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs (just a few months before the election that would put Nasheed in office), Justin Ginnetti shared an interview with then-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Abdulla Shahid (at present [2025], Shahid is president of the Maldivian Democratic Party, which was deposed in the 2012 coup). When asked about the government’s policy of moving islanders from those atolls most at risk from being subsumed under the seas, Shahid indicated that the “development of safer islands is one of the key priorities outlined in the National Adaptation Programme of Action initiated in 1998.” However, he noted that progress toward that goal
has been rather slow. First of all, it is important to note that relocation is voluntary—there can be no forced movement under any circumstances. Clearly, it took people a long time to understand the potential benefits of relocation and to weigh those benefits against the more obvious appeal of staying on their more familiar local islands. Quite understandably, many islanders were for a long time reluctant to leave their home islands. Yet at the same time, the government needed to explain that it was difficult, if not impossible, to protect vulnerable communities on their existing small islands. These are difficult questions and this is why the government has always taken a slow, step-by-step approach.
Although describing climate change as an “existential threat” to the Maldives in the same interview, in 2019, Shahid, then Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, was photographed conducting a meeting with the Acting Chief Executive Officer of ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. It’s not clear what was discussed, but the meeting came four years after the alleged discovery of oil and gas reserves off the coastlines of the Maldives.
As it turns out, while some locals were leaving their home atolls, other islands were being leased out to international hotel resorts to create luxury getaways. In a 2019 report for Transparency International, researchers Thomas Shipley, Matthew Jenkins, and Ahid Rasheed detail the corruption surrounding the island sales that reached the highest echelons of the Maldivian power structure.
The island-sales scheme centered on Ahmed Adeeb, who served as tourism minister from 2012 to 2015 and vice-president in 2015. Shipley, Jenkins, and Rasheed explain that the scheme was first uncovered in 2014, but the information was suppressed until Al Jazeera published the details in 2019. According to its investigation, Adeeb
conspired to lease out over 50 islands and submerged coral lagoons for private developments in 2014 and 2015. Adeeb oversaw a vast system of bribery and kickbacks that has implicated local business tycoons, international businesspeople and other senior politicians…. [T]he mechanics of the scheme revolved around the relationship between Adeeb and his friend, Abdulla Ziyath, who was the managing director of the MMPRC (Maldives Marketing and PR Corporation). The two men arranged for the MMPRC to take control of the process for leasing islands, effectively circumventing the tourism ministry and a legal requirement for leases to be subject to public tenders.
Ultimately, fees were directed to the MMPRC rather than the state, resulting in a multi-million discount for some island buyers—while the state lost as much as US$80 million. According to Shipley, Jenkins, and Rasheed,
Adeeb and Ziyath arranged for much of this money to be handed out to those with inside knowledge of the scheme, including parliamentarians and judges. The scheme went all the way to the top…. President Yameen received US$1 million into a bank account in his name.
While political corruption may be troubling enough on its own, it’s the environment that may pay the highest price for the scheme, the authors write. The money redirected into private accounts “encompasses expenditure for waste management, waste water management and the protection of biodiversity.” Eroding islands threaten some eighty-five “marine and land species endemic to the Maldives that are classified as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.
In September 2023, Mohamed Muizzu, leader of the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), defeated Solih to become president. The election placed Muizzu in the middle of a tug-of-war between India and China for strategic access to a key area of the Indian Ocean for security monitoring and shipping.
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Both Delhi and Beijing have given the Maldives hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans in recent years. How adept the Maldives is at playing the game of international geo-politics is explored by legal scholar Azra Naseem, who writes that “the Maldives is a microcosm of some of the world’s most pressing problems such as declining respect for human rights and international norms, and volatile religious militancy.” She also finds that the Maldives is
becoming an increasingly important cog in the Indian Ocean region’s security machinery. Aside from numerous expressions of varying degrees of concern, the “international community” has appeared largely helpless in asserting any authority over the Maldives’ regression into full-scale authoritarianism. India, the country’s closest neighbour and one of the world’s largest democracies, can also be seen as having “read the Maldives wrong” on several occasions, leading to many missteps in the long-standing relations and a consequential inability for (or lack of interest in) exercising much influence on Maldivian affairs despite developments that may threaten India’s own security as well as that of the wider Indian Ocean Region. It is possible that this lack of action with regard to the situation in the Maldives is related to lack of knowledge and understanding of the extent of the political and social turmoil within the country.
The “lack of knowledge” that dates to the islands’ socio-cultural origins continues to shape the contemporary geo-political situation. And many higher echelon Maldivians, zigzagging between cozying up to India and China, appear to benefit from tourists who don’t look beyond the sun loungers and the cocktail bar on their private atoll. If visitors did rouse themselves from their somnambulant “island paradise,” they might notice that those sky-blue lagoons aren’t just tempting to hotel guests; they’re also part of a power play between a tiny island nation and two global super-powers that has only just begun.
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