TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Is the Maldives India’s Grenada, and will Narendra Modi be India’s Reagan?

Under the redoubtable Ronald Reagan in 1983, the United States sent troops into Grenada, a Caribbean speck much farther away from the American mainland than the Republic of Maldives is from mainland India. The US forces ousted a violent, communist, Cuban-backed regime that had suspended Grenada’s democracy and was hostile to the United States, and restored a democratic order that was appropriately pro-American.

I’m attempting to draw a parallel here: There is today in the Maldives—which is even more intimately in India’s sphere of influence than Grenada was in Washington’s—a regime that has hijacked Maldivian democracy, is almost pathologically antagonistic to India and is backed by a China that’s muscling hard into India’s rightful precinct.

So: Is the Maldives India’s Grenada, and will Narendra Modi be India’s Reagan?

My advice is, if you can be Reagan, you should be Reagan.