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However much India and China quarrel over their unsettled borders and their competing influences in South Asia, their burgeoning economic ties would ensure a level of normalcy in bilateral relations. Or so went the old assumption. Hence the two quietly defused the 2017 Doklam crisis, and India time and again underplayed Chinese border adventures. The Indian establishment was most reluctant to blame China for the recent skirmishes in Ladakh as well. It was nothing big and everything would soon be settled amicably, it kept saying. Then the Ladakh crisis reached a tipping point.

The Chinese kept escalating, and it became impossible for India to fudge it anymore. China was intent on making a point. There has been a shift in China’s attitude towards India following the latter’s amendment of its national map in November 2019. The new map placed all the disputed territories in Jammu & Kashmir, including those claimed by Pakistan and China, under Indian flag. Removing all doubts about India’s intent, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah later told parliament that India was also most definitely claiming the Pakistan- and China-occupied Kashmir. This meant India now claimed a vital component of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship BRI project.

Despite their growing trade ties, Indian and Chinese strategic visions are increasingly at odds. China is more and more estranged from the US; at the same time India and the US are steadily inching closer. Indian Army Chief M.M. Naravane could have been venting his frustration at Chinese actions in Ladakh when he implicated Chinese hand in Nepal’s renewed claim over the Kalapani region. For him, with border skirmishes with China escalating, the Indian troop presence in Kalapani is a non-negotiable. Forget tri-lateral economic cooperation. The new game is all about getting a strategic upper hand.

This will exacerbate the tendency in India to see Chinese hand everywhere in South Asia. China for its part had not been that bothered by India’s actions in the neighborhood, for India was always an inconsequential regional player on its own. But as the American and Indian interests converge, China can no longer feign nonchalance.

China finds itself isolated by a ‘concert of democracies,’ with worse to come over the Covid-19 fallout. Thus shunned, it’s getting close to Russia. The two countries have just agreed on a new missile defense system for China. They also plan a joint mission to the moon. Beijing and Moscow see no alternative to working together to minimize the US presence in the Indo-Pacific. As I have written before, it is no more farfetched to imagine China and Russia banding together to foil ‘American designs’ on Nepal. Not long ago, the Oli government was subtly advised from up north to invite Vladimir Putin, say to inaugurate an international Buddhist conference in Lumbini. 

The global Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting ‘China-bashing’ have only exacerbated the old US-China rivalry. China’s hope that India would keep a safe distance from the US and help it counter anti-China Covid-19 narrative has proven misplaced. As has India’s calculation that the ‘mercantilist’ China is ready to ignore its strategic interests in South Asia. Countries like Nepal will have to live with the upshots of their growing differences. The way the Kalapani dispute has resurfaced is only the start of this new, multi-pronged geopolitical drama. 

Karma is not fate. It’s not destiny. Fate is a quick fix, karma is not. Fate or destiny is not the teaching of truly enlightened masters. It is the creation of defeatist and escapist minds that refuse to take responsibility.

We may think that it must be fate when there is no other way to explain things. A close one dies. A friend turns foe. Or a crow poops on your suit just as you are entering a building for a crucial business meeting. You become resentful and it reflects in your meeting. The deal is ruined. 

The question haunts: Why should it happen to me? You get disturbed, but somehow you collect yourself by blaming your fate, or God. That’s better than going crazy over the crow, isn’t it?

So why don’t the truly enlightened masters teach us about fate? Why do they only teach about karma? It’s due to their motivation. For the Buddha, the motivation is to help people find a sustainable way out of their suffering. He would never teach you any quick fix. Fate can give you some relief, but only briefly. After accepting that the crow poop was an act of fate, your next resentment would be: Why this fate for me? Why now? Why should destiny play a joke on me?

If you had known karma, you would view it differently. You would try to clean the poop with whatever you have, and go to the meeting. If needed, you would quickly explain what happened and proceed. You would trust your business partners to understand. The meeting would go smoothly.

By knowing karma, you could actually be a better fatalist! If you had known karma as the Buddha taught, you would take responsibility for what you do, not what the crow does. You would let fate do what it does, and chose your response responsibly. You would take the RIGHT ACTION now—at each present moment available to you—and leave the rest to ‘fate’. You would trust that a right action would lead to a right result. 

The Buddha’s teaching about karma is about understanding that when causes and conditions come together, it will lead to certain results. His motivation is to encourage people to apply this knowledge to create healthy states of mind. So instead of blaming the crow, he would ask you to be mindful of your anger and resentment, take the right action of wiping your suit, and get into the meeting room with a calm and forgiving mind. Your choice of action would create a healthy state of mind. You would create good karma.

Without shifting the blame on anyone or anything, karma tells us that our present condition is the consequence of certain causes and conditions coming together in the past. Some of them are our doing, some aren't. There must be a multiple of causes for anything to happen. For the crow to fly over your head, maybe there was a dead rat across the street that it was trying to pick. Maybe the garbage picker didn't see it in the morning because his eyesight was weak. There could be a thousand causes. We can't go back in the past and fix all those things.

But that's only half of the story. Karma teaches us to look forward. We choose a healthy response NOW and make the right efforts so that the right causes and conditions are created for the future. At the same time, we know we cannot control everything that may influence the result. So we do our bit sincerely and let the result unfold. Karma will then make a good sense for us. 

A dangerous trend is taking hold in India. Since the promulgation of the new Nepali constitution in 2015 and the ensuing victory of the communist coalition under KP Oli, just about any important development in Nepal is now conveniently linked to China. The popular narrative in India seems to be that the current Nepali government is China’s puppet. This sort of gross generalization does great harm to India’s deep, multifarious relations with Nepal.

Even though the ruling NCP’s penchant for China is hard to deny, Nepal-China ties have their limits. Anyone acquainted with the political career of the current Nepali prime minister knows of his traditionally close relations with all the important political actors in New Delhi. But during the Indian blockade Oli found it convenient to distance himself from India and inch closer to China. The calculation paid off as the communist coalition he headed secured near two-thirds majority in the 2017 national elections. In this sense, he is an opportunist. But then which politician isn’t? To his credit, Oli has since tried to improve his frayed relations with India.

Oli realizes that open hostility towards India can extract a very high cost from a Nepali ruler. This is not just because Nepali rulers can’t afford to alienate their ‘big brother’. It is also a reflection of the complex and extensive Indo-Nepal ties. Yet we see India consistently trying to portray Oli as China’s handmaiden and even mull ways to remove him. Perhaps there could have been no bigger folly on India’s part than to first build a road in Lipulekh without consulting Nepal and then to suggest that the natural opposition against the road was orchestrated by China. Such callous treatment of Nepali sentiments has in fact only boosted Oli by rallying the entire country behind their prime minister.

We often hear that India has learned its lesson after the blockade. It hasn’t. Otherwise, why can’t it still respect Nepal as a sovereign country capable of making its own decisions? Why is Nepal still expected to get guidance from the south? Nepal is a functional democracy. If people don’t like this government, they will vote it out in the next election. But even as PM Oli was getting increasingly unpopular at home for his poor political judgment and lack of delivery, India, once again, threw him a lifeline by unilaterally building the road at Lipulekh. This has allowed the blockade-busting prime minister to again project himself as the only leader in Nepal capable of openly standing up to Indian bullying.

India, home to among the most astute geo-strategic thinkers over the ages starting with Kautilya, surely understands its indispensability to Nepal. The fate of the small Himalayan state is inextricably linked to India’s peace and prosperity. While talking of Chinese influence in Nepal, Indian thinkers like to define this or that ‘red line’ for Nepal, perhaps not realizing that the biggest red line for the land-locked country is its geography. Surely, even the most jingoistic Indian commentator does not seriously believe China can ‘replace’ India in Nepal. If you want to be a big power, try acting like one.

Despite all the concrete developments and luxuries of the 21^st century, we are in universal agreement that nature is essential for humanity’s survival. By providing various ecosystem services, the world’s biodiversity plays an irreplaceable role in providing food, water, air, energy, medicine, and a wide range of products and services—all of which determine the quality of our lives. This International Biodiversity Day (May 22) calls for a key reminder: Our “solutions are in nature” and our focus, attention, and commitments should reflect this awareness.

The estimates are telling: more than two billion people rely on fuelwood to meet their primary energy needs, four billion people rely primarily on natural medicines for their health care, and some 70 percent of drugs used for cancer are natural or are synthetic products inspired by nature. Human dependence on biodiversity is increasing as more and more resources are extracted at the cost of nature’s ability to continue providing these solutions for future generations.

But despite the fact that we turn to the natural world for our solutions, our growing dependence has led to its rapid decline. The Living Planet Index, a global measure of the health of populations of species, reported in 2018 that the world has seen ‘a decline of 60 percent in size of populations of vertebrate species between 1970-2014’. Among them, freshwater species populations have suffered the largest decline of 83 percent, which on an average means a decline of around four percent a year from 1970. Habitat degradation and loss, and overexploitation are responsible for more than two thirds of the threats for all animal species.

Even after 27 years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where the first global commitment for biodiversity conservation was agreed upon in order to avoid a scenario of further biodiversity loss, the problem has amassed in severity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has three main objectives: conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of the components of biological diversity, and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.

Nepal ratified the CBD on 23 November 1993, and the convention was enforced in Nepal from 21 February 21 1994. Nepal has expressed its commitment to meet the objectives and targets of the convention through various acts, plans, and policies. The National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2014-2020, a guiding framework for the management of Nepal’s biodiversity on a sustainable basis for the benefit of present and future generations, is one such example.  

While Nepal has made significant achievements in biodiversity conservation, we are also at a critical juncture in our development trajectory. As Nepal moves forward in its phase of rapid development, the future of key major freshwater sources and terrestrial biodiversity hangs in a precarious balance. Habitat loss through human encroachment, infrastructure development, agriculture expansion along with unsustainable harvesting, forest fires and overgrazing, continue to threaten Nepal's biodiversity.

All these threats vary in impact, according to scale, intensity and irreversibility, and need to be identified, prioritized, and addressed accordingly. In this phase of growth, we have the opportunity to learn from changing development paradigms that highlight the role of sustainability. Factoring nature’s role as a solution-provider is vital as we devise economic solutions for recovery.

Humanity’s relationship with nature demands urgent revisiting and reestablishment. Year 2020 was supposed to be a key juncture in this history, with major dialogues, deliberations, and decisions to be made around climate change, and biodiversity conservation largely for improving the quality of human lives. But today, amid the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic and all its economic and social implications, we are forced to realize the long-standing global environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

We are at the point of time when biodiversity loss is at its peak, or as some experts put it, “a tipping point.” Given that we understand the value of biodiversity better and we now know the scale of the problem—and the potential scale of the solution as well—we have the opportunity to ‘bend the curve’ or even reverse the loss of biodiversity for the well-being of humans and all life forms on earth.

Post-2020, the CBD has an ambitious vision where by 2050 biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet, and delivering benefits essential for all people. To contribute to this global vision and the national vision of ‘Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali,’ Nepal will also need to establish a post-2020 roadmap which determines goals for biodiversity conservation, develops measurable indicators for the same, and identifies an array of actions to support the achievement of these goals.

There is a pressing need to safeguard our planet's natural spaces, stop the loss of species therein (and the diversity of life) and apply a sustainable approach to our production and consumption in order to guarantee adequate food and water for human communities.

Traditional biodiversity conservation interventions such as species, protected area and landscape management will always remain key, but actions must also address major drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem changes, considering all emerging threats and challenges. There is a need to come up with approaches and strategies that can contribute to a combination of economic, societal and environmental goals, avoiding trade-offs and emphasizing win-win scenarios—ultimately leading to build a future in which people live in harmony with nature.

The author is the Climate and Energy Lead at WWF Nepal