Both Bhutan and the Maldives constitute Southasia's most interesting democratic experiments at the moment; and both seem to have hit on a formula to deal with India as a lucrative way to keep their boats afloat.
India is like a giant planet orbited by moons. Some of these moons, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, are quite large; others are medium-sized, like Nepal and Sri Lanka; and then there are the tiny specks of Bhutan and the Maldives. India's gravitational pull puts these latter firmly in the parent planet's sphere of influence, but the moons are also protected from being swallowed up by their centrifugal force. However, that did not protect one moon, called Sikkim, from falling out of its orbit and merging with India in 1975. Despite its size and gravitational attraction, India has always looked at its neighbours with a sense of insecurity. India borders all of them, none of them border each other, but on the other hand they all surround India. The neighbours, for their part, have also tried to assert their independence by trying to counterbalance their proximity by being friendly with an outside power, usually China. And that is when friction arises.
Even though Beijing and New Delhi have made a gentlemen's understanding to put their territorial disputes into deep freeze for now, and to work together with regard to their common dependence on the world's natural resources, the traditional mutual suspicion between these two Asian giants has grown over the past few years. Beijing has tacitly acknowledged that countries south of the Himalaya are in India's sphere of influence, in exchange for Indian acceptance of its annexation of Tibet. And lately, China's strategic move to secure the region's sea lanes for its energy and mineral imports from Africa and the Gulf has brought it into direct confrontation with India, which regards the ocean that bears its name as its backyard.
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are conjoined triplets that are still going through pangs of separation. We know quite a lot about their complicated three-way relationship. Nepal and India, on the other hand, are so close that they distrust each other – especially when Kathmandu gets too cosy with Beijing, as happened during the nine-month reign of the Maoist-led government that ended in early May this year. Sri Lanka got away with palling around with both Pakistan and China, and India even tolerated Colombo buying arms from both because it did want the Tamil Tigers hunted into extinction. So that leaves us with the region's two most idyllic countries: Bhutan and the Maldives. With a combined population of barely one million, one would expect India, with its population of one billion, not to be preoccupied with these tiny satellites. And yet, something is happening to the tectonics of Asian geopolitics that has made these two small neighbours suddenly very important to New Delhi.