The Red Line: Who is India's Biggest Strategic Enemy?

 India is fast becoming one of the world's great powers, set to take the number 2 or 3 slot by 2050. This is unless another country were to derail India's current path, and the list of potential derailers is fairly long. So this week we take a look into who will be India's great strategic threats over the next 3 decades, and where India sits in the power struggle for leadership of South Asia today. This weeks guests are Swaminathan Aiyar (CATO Institute) Dhruva Jaishankar (ORF/Brookings) Harsh V Pant (London School of Economics)

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Nautilus Magazine: The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

Typically the preparation of the animal is where you have exposure. By the time it’s cooked and prepared, the virus would have been dead. It’s more common that transmission is through the animal shedding or people slaughtering the animal, when they’re exposed to bodily fluids, blood, and secretions. With the avian influenza from poultry, a lot of the exposure and infections go back to the preparation of chicken for cooking. In Egypt, for instance, when you look at who was infected, more common than not it was a woman, directly responsible for slaughtering and preparing the animal. [...]

Certainly. We’ve been able to identify bats as reservoirs for coronaviruses and documented specific bat populations as reservoirs for Ebola virus. We want to understand how each of these bats operate within an ecosystem. Do they have certain behaviors and practices that either keep them remote from or proximal to human populations? The bat population in which we isolated the Ebola virus in West Africa was a species of bat that also tends to co-roost within human housing, so it elevates the opportunity for spillover. [...]

Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. [...]

Oh, sure. It was predictable. It’s like if you had no traffic laws and were constantly finding pedestrians getting whacked by cars as they crossed the street. Is that surprising? No. All you need to do is to better manage how we set up crosswalks, how we establish traffic rules and regulations. We’re not doing that. We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Overpopulation & Africa

For most of our history, the human population grew slowly. Until new discoveries brought us more food and made us live longer. In just a hundred years the human population quadrupled. This led to apocalyptic visions of an overcrowded earth. But the population growth rate actually peaked in the 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have crashed as countries industrialize and develop. World population is now expected to balance out at around 11 billion by the end of the century. But the big picture conceals the details.

Let us look at one region in particular: Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019 it was home to a billion people living in 46 countries. Although its growth rate has slowed down in the last few decades, it is still much higher than in the rest of the world. While some projections expect around 2.6 billion people others reckon with up to 5 billion by 2100. Such growth would be a huge challenge for any society. But Sub-Saharan Africa is also the poorest region on earth. So is Sub-Saharan Africa doomed? And why do the projections vary by 2.4 billion people?

UnHerd: Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

Both Hitler and Mussolini incentivised childbearing with limited success. In the 1960s Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu, eager to boost his nation’s demographic heft, removed the availability of contraception overnight. At first there was a sharp increase in the number of babies being born, but before too long people found ways around the system, and by the time of his fall, Ceaușescu’s Romania was not performing much better from a population perspective than most of its neighbours – which is to say, very poorly. [...]

Likewise in nearby Poland, where the current government stands on a pro-traditional-family platform and since 2016 has offered relatively generous child benefits – £100 per month per child – as well as maintaining strict anti-abortion laws. The policy has been credited with helping the ruling Law and Justice party win re-election, but, as in Hungary, the rise in fertility is small and still leaves Poland at barely two-thirds of what would be required for replacement. [...]

For now, two things for sure can be said. First, the best guarantee of avoiding the very lowest fertility rates in developed countries is an acceptance of extra-marital births and assistance to women in combining work and family. Where women get the education to aspire but are not encouraged to combine aspiration with motherhood, they tend to opt for the former, which is why fertility rates are so low in countries with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace, such as Italy and Japan, but higher in places like Scandinavia and France.

Second, much as governments can try their best, the only true guarantee of replacement fertility is a family-oriented and child-loving culture. Societies or ethnic groups wanting to survive and thrive should not just look to their governments for tax breaks and benefits but should look to themselves, their values and attitudes.

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euronews: Bad diets deadlier than smoking tobacco, warns new study

An analysis of almost 20 years of diet data from 195 countries found that poor diets killed 11 million people globally in 2017.

The biggest killer of them all is salt, which was found to have shortened the lives of 3 million people, according to the global burden of disease study published by the Lancet on Thursday.

Cardiovascular disease was a major killer for approximately 10 million out of 11 million food-related deaths.

Consuming not enough fruit was found to have contributed to the death of 2 million people, while a diet of too little whole grains contributed to the death of 3 million lives. [...]

China in particular had the highest rates of diet-related cardiovascular disease deaths (299 deaths per 100,000 people) and the highest rates of diet-related cancer deaths (42 deaths per 100 000 population).

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Quartz: Air pollution is a bigger killer than tobacco use in India

In India, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the entire population lives in conditions where levels of the hazardous PM2.5 pollutants in the air are above the World Health Organisation’s permissible limits, the study says. It adds that 60% of the population in India is also exposed to household air pollution due to the burning of firewood and other biomass such as cattle dung cakes for cooking. [...]

In 2017, about 1.2 million people died in India due to air pollution-related illnesses such as lung cancer, type-2 diabetes, and pneumonia, the report says. This makes air pollution the third biggest national health risk, higher than even tobacco use. [...]

While it is second only to China in the number of PM 2.5-linked deaths, India also recorded the highest number of deaths caused by household air pollution in any country.

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IFLScience: Nepal's Tiger Population Doubles Thanks To Dedicated Conservation Work

Once found throughout the Asian continent and several Asian islands, tigers (Panthera tigris) have been wiped out of existence in many regions and are endangered in all their remaining pockets of habitat due to human activities, chiefly deforestation for agriculture and urbanization (more than 40 percent of native tiger ecosystems have been destroyed in the past 20 years alone), depletion of prey species, and poaching.

Per the IUCN Red List, tigers have disappeared from Java, Bali, southwest and central Asia, and from large areas of southeast and eastern Asia over the past 100 years. Currently, tigers inhabit about 7 percent of their former range, with evidence of breeding populations in Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, and potentially China and Myanmar. It is estimated that there were around 100,000 tigers in the wild in the early 1900s; now there are around 3,200 tigers – a figure that encompasses all subspecies.

Nepal’s success provides a model of how other nations can fulfill their pledge to meet the goal of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s TX2 project. Launched at the WWF’s 2010 Tiger Summit, TX2 is an ambitious research, conservation, and anti-poaching project aimed at doubling the total tiger population to 6,000 individuals by 2022 – the next Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac. Nepal and 12 other nations within the species’ range have committed to the plan.

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The New York Review of Books: Bangladesh’s Authoritarian Turn

Alam’s legal team managed to appeal to a higher court, which ordered that he be taken to a hospital and examined by a physician who can investigate torture. But over the weekend, Alam was moved to another jail and charged with spreading rumors and hurting the image of Bangladesh. On August 13, UN human rights experts called for his immediate release, but as of this writing he is still imprisoned. [...]

The students had taken to the streets because of a July 29 incident in which the driver of a private bus, competing with the driver of another private bus to pick up passengers near a stop, had rammed into a group of students who were attempting to cross a major road, killing two of them and injuring twelve others. Road safety is notoriously poor in Bangladesh. According to the national committee to protect shipping, roads, and railways, 7,397 people died on Bangladeshi roads last year, and the figure for this year had already reached 2,471 in June. Driving standards are lax, with many unlicensed drivers, a high proportion of unroadworthy vehicles, poorly lit highways, malfunctioning traffic signals, and ill-maintained roads. [...]

This summer, students’ demands were for something far more modest and straightforward: safer roads. But the government of Sheikh Hasina did not appreciate their show of defiance. As the current student protest entered its second week, on August 3, young men belonging to two ruling party-affiliated leagues, Chhatra (students) and Jubo (youth), disrupted the demonstrations. Armed with machetes and sticks and wearing helmets so that they couldn’t be identified, they began attacking students and journalists to break up the protests. Alam witnessed all this and began recording—and then told Al-Jazeera what he’d seen. [...]

The government’s anxiety is surprising, considering it faces no real opposition. Hasina is probably calculating that, aside from criticism from some NGOs, the international community won’t bother her because her government has performed the important task of providing asylum for hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who recently fled murderous persecution in neighboring Myanmar. With nearly 800,000 displaced Rohingyas now in southern Bangladesh needing to be looked after, none of the major donor countries—the US, the EU, and Australia—want to alienate Bangladesh. Nor is Hasina likely to come under any pressure from Bangladesh’s closest regional ally, India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing elections there in a few months, and he wants to crack down on Bangladeshi migration into Assam, which neighbors Bangladesh. Modi would also like to expel some 40,000 Rohingyas elsewhere in India, a decision human rights lawyers have challenged in Indian courts; if he succeeds, Bangladesh would likely be the refugees’ ultimate destination. Finally, although her government has done little to protect secularist bloggers, Hasina presents herself to the international community as its partner against fundamentalist terrorism.

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The New York Times: Is India Creating Its Own Rohingya?

Assam is the most populous of India’s northeastern states. As part of a labyrinthine bureaucratic exercise, 32.9 million people and 65 million documents were screened over five years at a cost of $178 million to ascertain which residents of Assam are citizens. The bureaucrats running the National Register of Citizens accepted 28.9 million claims to Indian citizenship and rejected four million. [...]

Politics over illegal migration from Bangladesh into Assam has been a potent force in the politics of the state for decades. In 2008, an Assam-based NGO approached the Supreme Court of India claiming that 4.1 million illegal immigrants had been registered as voters in the state. In 2014, the Supreme Court ordered the federal government to update the National Register of Citizens. [...]

The Supreme Court, which had ordered the process underlying the National Register of Citizens, has now directed that no action should be initiated against those left out and that a procedure should be set up for dealing with claims and objections. A final list is expected at the end of an appeal process. And it is not clear what transpires at the end of that process, which is expected to be long and harrowing. So far six overcrowded jails doubling as detention centers in Assam house 1,000 “foreigners,” and the Indian government has approved building of a new detention center that can house 3,000 more. [...]

Apart from removing a huge number of voters who were likely to vote against the B.J.P., the party has already shown that as Mr. Modi struggles on the economic front, the N.R.C. will be a handy tool to consolidate Hindu voters in Assam — the majority of the people rendered stateless are Muslims — and the rest of the country going into the general elections in the summer of 2019.

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Jacobin Magazine: Bangladesh’s Incomplete Revolution

East Pakistan faced what amounted to internal colonialism. Economic exploitation extracted millions annually, and the Pakistani government still heavily discriminated against Eastern citizens. Badruddin Umar, active during this time in the East Pakistani Maoist movement, wrote that “the slogan of Independent Bengal had begun to be raised in the streets of Dhaka, especially by the workers belonging to the leftist students’ organisations during the 1968–69 movement. At mass rallies, demonstrators chanted Joi Bangla (Long Live Bengal) and called for Krishok-Sramik Raj, “rule by peasants and workers.” [...]

Though the East had stronger left-wing traditions than the West, Communist parties failed to lead the mass movement or profit from the elections. One reason for this was that both the most dynamic parts of the Left and Pakistan itself had strong ties to Mao’s China. Most left-wing forces were in some way influenced by Maoism, and the government maintained friendly relations with China as a counterweight to their shared rival, India. Because of Ayub’s “objective anti-imperialist characteristics,” much of the Maoist left did not oppose his regime and avoided making demands that might weaken Pakistan’s position in relation to India, including self-determination for the East. [...]

The pro-Moscow left was much smaller, but it enjoyed disproportionate representation in the press and academia. In both halves of Pakistan, these leftists focused on restoring parliamentary democracy so single-mindedly that they became almost indistinguishable from liberal forces. In the East, Soviet sympathizers supported self-determination but were little more than an appendage of the AL. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies.

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The Atlantic: The 'Underground Railroad' To Save Atheists

But in many countries across the globe, the danger of expressing non-belief comes directly from the state. According to a comprehensive report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a U.K.-based non-profit that aims to promote the rights of non-religious people, there are currently 12 nations in which apostasy (including atheism) can be punished by death: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Pakistan, meanwhile, threatens the death penalty for blasphemy, which may include expressions of atheism. [...]

When faced with these threats, many people are understandably reluctant to admit their religious doubts even to their closest confidants, making it difficult to gauge how widespread atheism actually is around the world. But there are signs that the numbers of atheists are sizable. A 2012 Win/Gallup International Poll, for instance, found that 19 percent of people in Saudi Arabia claimed not to be religious, with 5 percent identifying as convinced atheists—roughly the same proportion as in the U.S. That’s a surprisingly high number given the difficulties of exploring non-religious thought in this country, and the true figure may be greater; even if their responses remain anonymous, many non-believers may still have been reluctant to declare their religious doubts openly. [...]

In one early study from 2011, he found that people assume that atheists are more likely to commit immoral acts such as stealing money from a wallet left on the sidewalk, or failing to give the correct insurance information after a road accident. Indeed, of all the groups he measured—including Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, and homosexuals—only rapists were considered to be similarly untrustworthy. He has since shown that people are also more likely to implicitly associate atheism with incest, bestiality, animal torture, even murder and mutilation. Opinion polls, meanwhile, reveal that nearly 50 percent of people would rather that their children did not marry an atheist (compared to 34 percent who declared that they would be disappointed if their child married a Muslim).

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openDemocracy: Has rape become a weapon to silence atheists in Bangladesh?

This amendment aimed to curb free speech and targeted bloggers and writers who were trying to promote secular values in a civilised and peaceful way. Atheists were brutally attacked and several were killed in subsequent bloodbaths in 2015 and 2016. [...]

The organised persecution of atheists in Bangladesh began in 2013, following the Shahbag movement during which secular activists called for the hanging of Islamist politicians accused of war crimes during the 1971 war of independence, and the murder of atheist blogger Rajib Haider. [...]

The prime minister has herself publicly criticised those who speak out against religious belief. In 2015 she told Time magazine: “If anybody thinks they have no religion, OK, it’s their personal view... But they have no right to write or speak against any religion."

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The Conversation: Looking at terror attacks ‘per capita’ should make us rethink beliefs about levels of risk and Muslims

India is a good example. It ranks fourth on the list of terror-prone countries since 1970, with 408 deaths from terrorism in an average year.

But the average Indian need not be particularly worried about terrorism. The country is home to 1.27 billion people, and terrorism kills only one in 2,500,000 people – or 0.0000004% of the population – per year, once we translate total terror deaths to terror deaths per capita. The likelihood of dying from crime or in a road accident is far higher. [...]

So, although India has a relatively high number of terrorist attacks, an individual’s likelihood of dying in such an attack is minimal – because India has such a large population. [...]

A somewhat baffling conclusion from a long list of research articles states that terrorism is more likely to emerge in democracies, rather than non-democracies. This idea is difficult to reconcile with our intuition of democracy giving people political (and usually religious) freedom – so why should we see terrorism in such free countries?

It turns out that once we analyse terror per capita, democratic nations are less likely to witness terrorism. Again, take India, a large democracy that, at first glance, suffers a lot from terrorism. But, in per-capita terms, terrorism becomes less important.

Another popular belief states that countries with a sizeable Muslim population – such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh or Nigeria – are experiencing more terrorism than non-Muslim countries. This is true when looking at the total numbers of deaths. [...]

Approximately 23% of the world population identifies as Muslim. But, since September 11, Islamist groups have conducted about 20% of terrorist attacks worldwide. Thus, terrorist attacks are – historically and today – less likely to be conducted by a Muslim than by a non-Muslim group.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained

Atlas Obscura: In Indonesia, Non-Binary Gender is a Centuries-Old Idea

Some might assume that the shift towards viewing gender as fluid or encompassing identities beyond the binary is a novel cultural change; in fact, several non-Western cultures—both historically and today—have non-binary understandings of gender. In Indonesia, one ethnic group shows us that the idea that gender identity is expressed in more ways than two is actually hundreds of years old.

The Bugis are the largest ethnic group in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and are unique in their conception of five distinct gender identities. Aside from the cisgender masculinity and femininity that Westerners are broadly familiar with, the Bugis interpretation of gender includes calabai (feminine men), calalai (masculine women) and bissu, which anthropologist Sharyn Graham describes as a “meta-gender” considered to be “a combination of all genders.” [...]

Around the world, individuals who identify outside of the gender binary are seeing increasing legal and social recognition. In 2014, South Asia’s 4,000-year-old hijra third-gender community won a hard-fought victory when the Indian Supreme Court declared discrimination against hijra illegal and instituted a third gender option on government documents (the hijra have also won this right in Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Australia has allowed a third gender option on passports since 2011, and in the United Kingdom, the proliferation of the option to use the “Mx” title on government and bank documents encouraged the Oxford English Dictionary to officially add the honorific last year.

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AP: Questions rise over Bangladesh jailing 11,600 in crackdown

Within six days of announcing a crackdown on Islamist militants, Bangladesh had filled its jailhouses with 11,600 new detainees in what seemed like an astonishing display of law enforcement might. The problem is, less than 2 percent of those picked up are suspected radicals, and not one is considered to be a high-level operative.

The rest? Most are accused of petty crimes such as theft, burglary or small-time drug smuggling. At least 2,000 are members of the main opposition party, according to its spokesman, while others were believed to belong to a key ally of that party. [...]

Hasina announced the crackdown last week, after the wife of a police superintendent was shot and stabbed to death. The victim had been an ardent campaigner against militants, and many within the country's establishment were stunned by the attack on someone they had considered as one of their own.

Yet police now say the crackdown was never meant to target only radicals, but was also aimed at arresting people accused of trading in narcotics and firearms. While that "special drive" was carried out in tandem with the anti-militancy campaign, it was never communicated to the media until it was over, police spokesman Kamrul Ahsan said.

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