With Tunisian elections just completed, Egypt's parliamentary elections coming up and Libya veering into a dark new period, observers of the Arab Spring are wondering what will become of these revolutions once the euphoria subsides and the struggle over democracy grows apace.
There is one corner of South Asia where these questions hit particularly close to home — the Maldives — where the heads of state of every country in the region will meet for the SAARC summit this week. This tiny nation, a collection of 26 atolls just southwest of India's southern tip, is best known as a canary-in-the-coalmine for climate change. The media savvy president, Mohamed Nasheed, famously held a cabinet meeting underwater in 2009 to publicize the threat posed by global warming to vulnerable countries like his. The Maldives might be just as interesting, though, as a different kind of bellwether —for other Muslim-majority countries emerging from years of dictatorship.
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