After 70 years, Project Cheetah has taken off to settle these animals in India. Under the programme, cheetahs from Africa will be settled in Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. 

The cheetahs were supposed to come to India on August 15, but due to medical examination and other problems, it was postponed. Cheetahs are to be brought from Namibia and South Africa under the Cheetah Project over the next five years. There is a plan to reintroduce 50 cheetahs across the country. Initially, eight cheetahs (five male and three female) will be airlifted from Johannesburg to Delhi airport. 

From there, army helicopters will take them to eight helipads being built in the Park and Karahal for the movement of VVIPs. A road from Karahal to the Park is being built as an alternative transport system. The Public Works Department and MP Road Development Corporation were instructed to complete the work by September 14.

Cheetahs will be brought from Namibia in special boxes. There will be one cheetah per box, which will have a skylight for light and air to filter in. The cheetahs can be sedated with anesthesia, but they will regain consciousness in half an hour and then they will not be sedated. The behaviour of the cheetahs will be observed for three months. If all goes well, a male cheetah will be released into the wild. He will be fitted with a radio collar and will be monitored continuously. After about four months of success, a female cheetah will be released.

Dogs, along with cows and buffaloes, are being vaccinated in and around Kuno-Palpur Sanctuary before bringing the cheetahs here. In particular, multivalent and anti-rabies vaccine will be applied to dogs so that no infection spreads to the cheetahs. The vaccine also has a dose of protection against canine coronavirus. 

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The Kuno river, originating from Patai village in Guna district, joins the Chambal. Kuno National Park is spread over 748 sqkm on the border of Sheopur and Morena districts on the banks of the Chambal. Although the arrival of cheetahs in Madhya Pradesh, which is also called the Tiger state, should not have been a big deal, it has become so because no one has seen cheetahs in the country for the last 70 years. The last cheetah was seen in 1948 in Koriya district of Chhattisgarh. After this, the government announced a reward of Rs 5 lakh to anyone showing a cheetah in the country, but this didn’t help either. 

On September 7, four South African experts Michelle Febb, Amfo Tjian, Junisani Mkhubel and Dr David Zimmerman took a full tour of the cheetah enclosure, as well as all the blocks built inside the enclosure. They gave some suggestions and asked them to fulfill whatever other requirements were needed. They also said that Kuno was completely suitable for the cheetahs. 

The Supreme Court in January 2020 allowed the centre to introduce the African cheetah to a suitable habitat in India, including Kuno. The Court passed this order on an application filed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) seeking permission for the introduction of the African cheetah from Namibia as the Court was monitoring the government’s ambitious project.

While fearing that the cheetah may come into conflict with a parallel and a much-delayed project to reintroduce lions into the same sanctuary, in May 2012, the top court had stalled the plan to initiate foreign cheetahs into the Palpur-Kuno sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. It was also worried whether the African cheetahs would find the sanctuary favourable as far as abundance of prey was concerned.

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The Union government in 2010 set up an expert panel for reintroducing the cheetah in India. This panel recommended that the home of the fastest animal in the world could be Kuno-Palpur in Madhya Pradesh, Velavadar National Park in Gujarat and Tal Chapar sanctuary in Rajasthan.

In 2010, NTCA filed a plea requesting permission to introduce African cheetahs from Namibia as the animal had become extinct in India. But the apex court, while calling the animal a “foreign species”, declined permission in 2013. The last cheetah died in India in 1947. After five years, it was declared extinct in 1952 and since then, there has been no cheetah in India. The cheetah is the only large carnivore in the country to become extinct due to hunting and food problems. 

Before the Mughal period, the number of cheetahs in the world was very high. The cheetah is a carnivorous animal and habitual hunter, yet it was reared in many countries, including Egypt and India. Cheetahs were also domesticated during the Mughal period, but were used as weapons to hunt the enemy. After this, kings started hunting cheetah to prove themselves as best hunters. In 1948, King Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of Koriya hunted the last three cheetahs remaining in India. It is said that Akbar had preserved about 1,000 cheetahs during his reign. It has also been recorded in the Journal of Bombay Natural History Society that there have always been cheetahs in India. But, gradually they disappeared.

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Doubts were also raised whether it would be possible in India to give the large area required for cheetahs to survive. Also, they may find it difficult to live here due to the environment. Although the cheetah is a carnivorous and predatory animal, it can survive only in a healthy environment. In all the areas of the world where pollution has increased, the cheetah became extinct naturally. However, in India, it was eliminated by hunting. 

Increasing pollution and a thick layer of CO2 in the atmosphere has heated the Earth. The survival of cheetahs depends on a clean environment and balance in CO2 levels.  

—By Shivam Sharma and India Legal Bureau

History has recorded nations carrying out their expansionist agendas with different outcomes. The face-off in Ladakh has shown China’s bid to annex Indian territory in open defiance of world opinion.

By Justice (retd) Kamaljit Singh Garewal

The year 1815 was a watershed in Europe. Peace had returned after the Congress of Vienna and European powers began to look to Asia and Africa for territorial expansion. This gave rise to new worries for the British in India. Tsar Alexander I was looking to expand towards Tartary to establish links with the khanates (entity ruled by a khan) which lay between the Caspian Sea and the Pamirs. China was weak, decadent and feudal under the Qing Emperor and confined to the East. Xinjiang was Muslim and very distant, though it was on the trade route to Kashgar and Samarkand from where trade flowed down to India and Persia, and beyond to Turkey and Europe. And Tibet, a remote high plateau belonging to devout Buddhists, was ruled by their God King.

Generals and diplomats do not think of events on the ground in terms of the Great Game or the Silk Road, but journalists and armchair travellers do. This is because they revel in delightful travelogues of 19th and early 20th century travellers who wrote of Central Asian cities, of rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush and its fruit-laden valleys, of the majestic Indus river and snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram, of the difficult unpassable Kunjerab and Mustagh Passes, of cities and their treasures buried for thousands of years under inhospitable desert sands of Taklamakan and of overland journeys on horseback from Peking to Srinagar, Kashmir, and gave exciting accounts of the land and the people and the political situation.

The term Great Game was first used by a British agent in a letter to a friend when he came overland from Moscow to India through the Bolan Pass, gathering intelligence on the way. This was the first time the Governor-General in Calcutta felt alarmed about the possibilities of Russian armies invading India through the Khyber/Bolan Passes. It is now used to describe Russia’s threatened south-eastern advance in the 19th century or the Russia bogey. Russians had already established themselves in Siberia up to the Pacific Ocean and Alaska. But Russia had always fancied a warm water port. They established relations with Tartary, the Central Asian khanates, to be in a position to threaten the plains of Hindustan.

The Silk Road as a term describes the old trading routes between China and Europe, travelled by Marco Polo, the Venetian trader who in 1293 visited Kubla Khan’s Xanadu. In the 19th century, explorers came looking for buried treasures in mythical cities covered by the sands of the treacherous Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang.

The Russian moves had begun under Catherine the Great when that empire stretched across Siberia and up to Alaska. After Catherine’s death in 1796, her son Czar Alexander I continued her expansionist policies. Tartary, made up of Turkic speaking remnants of the Golden Horde, inhabiting the steppes east of the Caspian Sea, was waiting to be occupied by Russia. And on the other side of the Pamirs was also Tartary tempting China. These khanates are now Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to the west of the Pamirs and on the eastern side lay East Turkmenistan of the Uyghurs, now Xinjiang province of China. Anyone holding India at that time would naturally have felt very concerned. The British policy was to defend its Empire, its jewel in the crown, at all cost. For this, they needed reliable and accurate intelligence, which was what the Great Game was all about, from the British point of view.

In 1799, ten years after the French Revolution, Ranjit Singh (19), took up the leadership of his clan and began to consolidate his control over Punjab. He first took Lahore in 1799 from the Afghans and was crowned Maharaja in 1801. He then subdued various clans of the Punjab. In 1815, the Gurkha army was routed at Kangra and pushed back to Nepal. Multan was annexed in 1818 and Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan were taken from the Afghans in 1819. Ahmad Shah Barelvi, leading a jihad against the Sikhs, was comprehensively defeated by the Maharaja’s army in the battle of Balakot in 1831. This cut off the Afghans from Kashmir. Peshawar was taken in 1834 by General Hari Singh Nalwa who crossed the Khyber to invade Afghanistan. The Maharaja’s army under General Zorawar Singh led many successful expeditions into Xin­jiang and Tibet, but the General fell in battle in 1843 at Taklakot in Tibet and is buried there. These little bits of history show how strong Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire had become and why the British felt threatened and wanted to subdue it. The entire scene of action in 2020, in the north-western part of India, is taking place in the former Punjab of 1846.

The British gained influence in Afghanistan at a huge cost. After the first Anglo-Sikh war in 1846, under the Treaty of Amritsar, Kashmir was sold to Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu for Rs 75 lacs. After the second Anglo-Sikh war, Punjab was annexed in 1849. Two wars were fought with the wily Afghans in 1839-42 and 1878-80.

After this, there was a fragile truce on the frontier. Finally, in 1897, the Durand Line was drawn to divide the Pathan lands and annexe the eastern half, which they called the North West Frontier Province, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In the 19th century, the British always feared Russia even though it was 2,000 miles away, but by the end of the century, the two empires were only 20 miles apart in the Pamirs, separated only by the Afghan panhandle, the Wakhan corridor, with Gilgit on the eastern side. The British fears were real.

The beginning of the 20th century found Czarist Russia weakened, first defeated by a modernised Japan in 1905, and then by the slow and steady rise of revolutionary forces. This finished Czar Nicholas and the Romanovs. From the revolution in 1917 till the end of World War II, the Russian empire gave way to Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin. Germany too was defeated in 1919, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Hohenzollerns faded into oblivion and Hitler rose to power and World War II followed. Turkish Ottomans gave way to Kemal Ataturk in 1922, but also lost most of Turkish possessions in the Levant and Arabia. Events in China led to the overthrow of the decadent Qing Emperor and the rise of the Republic of China in 1911 under Sun Yatsen. Soon, the rise of Chinese communism also began. Later, Japan invaded China in 1938 and a civil war ensued between the nationalists and the communists.

At the end of World War II, with Germany and Japan defeated, the UN was founded by 51 countries who signed its Charter in San Francisco in 1945. After 75 years, the number has swelled to 193, plus had two special invitees—the Holy See and the State of Palestine. Between 1945 and now, 142 countries (and about 88 former colonies) joined the UN. Surprisingly, up to 1971, it was the nationalist Republic of China (not the People’s Republic of China) that as a founding member of the UN, continued as a permanent member of the Security Council.

It is a truism that once a country joins the UN as a member its aggressive territorial expansion must end. This is the raison d’être of the world body. There may be boundary disputes here or there over a few enclaves which must be peacefully resolved, but the India-China border is of a different category. In 1949, the present People’s Republic of China was not even a member of the UN, had no responsibility to follow its charter and no accountability to the international community. Communist China continued to colonise Xinjiang and Tibet, who too were not members of the UN and had no say in the world body either.

The annexation of Uyghur Xin­jiang and Buddhist Tibet was next on the Chinese colonisation project. Earlier in 1938, a civil war had been raging in China between the nationalists and the communists. Manchuria was under the occupation of Japan. Xinjiang had declared independence in 1933, calling itself East Turkmenistan. Still earlier in 1913, Tibet had driven out the Chinese and become independent under the Dalai Lama.

Starting with the Indian independence, colonisation as a rule was ending all over the world, but was rising in neighbouring China in a dangerously aggressive way.

Mao Tse-Tung’s communists defeated Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists in 1949, but this regime change was never recognised by the international community as a whole, save for a few nations.

The supporters included India and surprisingly, this friendly policy continued till 1959. First we allowed the annexation of Buddhist Tibet in 1951, then acquiesced to this annexation by keeping up good relations with communist China. The Dalai Lama landed in India in 1959 after the Lhasa Uprising, and set up a government-in-exile. What followed was the India-China border war in 1962.

It will be useful to recall how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had first brought down the Iron Curtain in Europe and engaged in the Cold War, even invaded Afghanistan in 1979 only to withdraw nine years later. But President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies ended the Cold War and altogether dismantled the USSR in 1991. Many Soviet republics, including the five Central Asian former khanates, became independent and are now equal members of the UN.

The Berlin Wall came down to unite West and East Germany. Re-organisation also took place in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. But the Chinese are determined to continue an expansionist policy without any obstacle or obstruction from the international community. How long can this open and continued defiance of world opinion continue? Is a Chinese perestroika and glasnost even thinkable?

—The writer is former judge, Punjab & Haryana High Court, Chandigarh and former judge, United Nations Appeals Tribunal, New York

Lead Picture: wgi.world

As the Zika virus spreads from Brazil to the rest of the world creating an international alarm and affecting babies, how prepared is India?
By Ramesh Menon

A virus spread by a mosquito is terrorizing the world. Called Zika, it is causing birth defects in children like smaller heads and damaged brains. This condition, called microcephaly, which causes genetic abnormalities, is otherwise triggered by drugs, alcohol or exposure to hazardous chemicals during pregnancy. The dreaded virus can also lead to neurological defects in adults. Women have been advised not to get pregnant for two years in some of the 23 affected countries. This has created panic among those expecting babies.

“Considering that women of childbearing age and pregnant women are the prime target group for the
Zika vaccine, we consider safety as the overriding factor in development of a new vaccine.” —Dr Sumathy, director of R&D, Bharat Biotech

When patients initially started suffering from mild fever, rash, joint aches, red eyes and muscle pain, it created no alarm. But an international alarm was set off when doctors in Brazil noticed over 4,000 babies born with microcephaly. America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention shot off a warning asking pregnant women not to travel to countries where Zika had been detected. There is no vaccine today against Zika and neither is there any medicine or antidote for it.

Scientists have found Zika in the amniotic fluid of women carrying fetuses with microcephaly. And recently, they have also found it in semen. All this has been foxing researchers.

The spread of Zika is insidious. Mosquitoes lay several hundred eggs on the walls of containers filled with water. Some can be as small as a bottle cap. The eggs then hatch in the water and become adults within a week, ready to bite their victims and infect them.

The virus itself derives its name from the Zika forest in Uganda, Africa, where it was first identified in 1947 in Rhesus monkeys. Humans were found to have contracted it in 1952. However, it was not prevalent in the Americas till last year. In the last few years, confirmed Zika cases have been reported from Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname and Venezuela.

DEADLY MOSQUITO

Mosquitoes are today the world’s biggest disease carriers. There is hardly any house without a repellent. But despite the fight by scientists to eradicate this tiny insect, they have failed even to limit its growth. But that’s not surprising considering that the female mosquito is capable of giving birth to nearly 700 offspring in its life cycle of about a month.

The Aedes mosquito is a weak flier and cannot fly more than 400 meters. But, it can be transported by travelers in their vehicles. If it can survive the temperature climate of the destination they are carried to, the danger is that it may be able to reproduce there and introduce the Zika virus. A mosquito which bites a person suffering from the virus can then transmit it to other humans when it bites them.

The mosquito gets attracted to human sweat and loves biting areas around the feet. It uses its sensory organs to sniff out victims even if they are three meters away. Male mosquitoes do not bite, are vegetarians and live on the juices of leaves. Only the females use their needle-shaped mouths to suck
out blood.

INDIANS WATCH OUT

India, like the rest of the world, is worried and has reasons to fear. In India, sparse medical detection facilities and ill-equipped laboratories only compound the problem. If the virus enters India, it is clear that it will have devastating consequences as mosquitoes happily proliferate in open sewers and unhygienic public spaces.

The Zika disease has the potential to spread anywhere, including India, where Aedes aegypti is widely prevalent. It could also spread due to poor immunity among the population and also due to the high volume of international travel, according to the WHO. The Aedes aegypti mosquito also causes dengue and chikungunya. According to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, 97,740 Indians were affected by dengue in 2015. Nearly 13,000 were affected by chikungunya. Besides, as Indians are frequent travelers, they can easily bring the virus home. Fortunately, no case has been reported in India till now.

The union health ministry is trying to get kits from abroad to test the virus. It is looking for technical assistance from the WHO to plan treatment, tests and prevention guidelines. It is also in touch with the Centres for Disease Control to know more about the infection and prepare accordingly. It is keeping a lookout for any sudden rise in birth defects. The Pune-based National Institute of Virology is preparing tests to detect the Zika virus. The victims are bitten mostly during the day. Mosquitoes become infected when they feed on a person already infected and then spread it to others.

The United Nations has warned that the Zika virus is spreading explosively and can infect around four million people in the Americas. The Pan American Health Organization stated that the virus may spread to areas where Aedes mosquitoes are found.

In December 2015, Brazil was forced to declare a national public health emergency due to Zika. It helped the country to immediately cut red-tapism, procure insecticides and equipment to fight the mosquito and deploy 3,10,000 health workers.

Earlier, Zika virus outbreaks occurred in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Experts say that it will continue to spread as people travel around the world. The only silver lining is that scientists have discovered a way to try and limit the mosquito population.

BIOTECH BUGS

In the southeastern Brazilian city of Piracicaba where Zika is causing havoc, everyday nearly a lakh mosquitoes are released. Sounds crazy? Not really. All these mosquitoes have been genetically engineered to transmit a lethal gene to mosquitoes that are spreading Zika. It remains to be seen if these biotech bugs can neutralize the growing population of mosquitoes that are spreading malaria, dengue and other related illness.

Meanwhile, Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech International Private Limited claims that it has made a breakthrough in developing the first vaccine to tackle Zika. It has been working on it for a year and plans to file a patent soon. It will be called Zikavac. Dr Sumathy, director of R&D here said: “Considering that women of childbearing age and pregnant women are the prime target group for the Zika vaccine, we consider safety as the overriding factor in development of a new vaccine. The vaccine methods developed before the devastating epidemic in Brazil came to light gave us an advantage.”

The ministry of health and family welfare has been advised by the WHO to be adequately prepared in case Zika hits India. The ministry is setting up a joint monitoring group under the director general of health services to monitor Zika if and when is detected. The Indian Council of Medical Research is working on identifying research priorities and planning appropriate action. Besides, rapid response teams would be activated at central and state levels. Each of these teams would comprise an epidemiologist, public health specialist, microbiologist and a medical specialist.

An emergency meeting of the WHO said a coordinated international response was needed to minimize the threat in the affected countries and reduce the risk of it further spreading. Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, South-East Asia regional director, WHO, said that countries in the region where the Aedes mosquito is prevalent must strengthen surveillance and take preventive measures against Zika. WHO has declared that the emergence of the Zika virus constitutes a public health emergency of international concern. India must move fast to protect itself.