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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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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Al Jazeera: After a year of elections, Nepal moves closer to China

Presumptive prime minister and UML chieftain Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli began his political career as a Maoist in the early 1970s in Jhapa across the border with India's West Bengal state. Those were the days of slogans like "China's Chairman is Our Chairman and China's Path is Our Path" rending the air in West Bengal. But Oli embraced revisionism early on and by 1990s he had begun to reclaim hyper-nationalist rhetoric. He is known better for his demagoguery than democratic convictions. [...]

Along with Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Nepal rushed to join One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, which aims to invest in infrastructural projects as a part of President Xi's peripheral diplomacy doctrine with China at its centre. The lapsed Maoist duo of Oli and Prachand expects to attract enough Chinese money to build trans-Himalayan railways, hydroelectric projects modelled after the Three Gorges dam and make the entire economy of Nepal look northwards for sustenance. [...]

Over one-third of the Nepalese economy is based on remittances from unskilled and low-skilled labourers sweating out in volatile countries. Sovereign guarantees of an externally dependent economy may not have anything more than geopolitical significance. That is likely to put a spanner in the grandiose plans of the Left Alliance if India decides to protect its traditional sphere of influence. [...]

Unless the Chinese decide to do to Nepal what the Soviets did for Cuba or the Americans for West Germany during the Cold War, Indian ports will continue to be the lifeline of the Nepalese economy. Religious, cultural, linguistic and social affinities between India and Nepal mean that a large number of poor Nepalese look towards India for permanent or seasonal employment. New Delhi is unlikely to loosen its grip in its backyard without some resistance. [...]

The much-vaunted Peace Process that brought Maoists into mainstream politics in 2006 is also far from complete. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hasn't yet completed its task of bringing perpetrators and victims of the decade-long armed conflict together. The Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons has not been able to ascertain the whereabouts of victims or identify the guilty. Without a sense of closure, wounds of the armed conflict would continue to fester.

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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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