n an interview to explain the deep and serious concerns India’s transgender community has with the recently introduced Transgender Persons Amendment Bill, Prof. Aqsa Shaikh, Professor of Community Medicine at Jamia Hamdard University, points out that the key error the government has made in the amendment bill is to assume that gender lies between the legs of an individual whereas, in fact, it lies in the hearts and minds of individuals. As Prof. Shaikh puts it: “Gender cannot be reduced to anatomy or verified through physical examination: it is a deeply felt sense of self.”

Prof. Shaikh points out that the amendment bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha on the 13th of March, is “a fundamental shift that undermines the core of what it means to be a transgender person in law. Under this formulation, tens of thousands of individuals who currently identify, and are legally recognized, as transgender may find themselves excluded. Their identities would not merely be ignored; they would be erased.”

In an interview to The Wire, Prof. Foad Izadi, Associate Professor of American Studies at Tehran University, who spoke from Tehran, says that Iran’s new supreme leader is injured and he cited reports to that effect from within Iran. Prof. Izadi also said it could be the case that BBC reports that the new supreme leader has survived a second attempt by Israel to kill him whilst he was in hospital could be correct. However, Prof. Izadi confirms that the new supreme leader is alive.

In strong and outspoken criticism of Indian foreign policy, a former National Security Advisor, M. K. Narayanan, has said that Indian foreign policy is confused and argues that we are not as influential as we once were. India may be internally and economically a more powerful country than it has ever been but our capacity to influence events around the world and win respect for our views is not as great as it was 20-30 or 40 years ago.

Mr. Narayanan said: “I think we are confused. I think India’s foreign policy has been confused for a very long time. I think this is one more instance of that kind. Somewhere down the line India still believes we are, or we have the ability, the capacity, to sort out the problems of other nations … I think this is part of the Indian belief that we are leaders of the global south, we are in a position to mediate, we have the authority or even the influence or the ability to sort out other people’s problems, etc. I think there is this misplaced understanding of where we stand in the world today … I certainly think that we are poorer in the eyes of the world today than we were when we were economically weaker … I think this is the quandary that we are in. We still stick to the idea that the world looks upon us as an important power broker. I think we need to get out of that comfortable area that we are in and realize that we are probably just one of the other countries in the world and no longer one that other countries look up to … if you really look at it you are not even a power to reckon with even in the region in which you are located. How then can you speak for the rest of the world? So we have problems ... That’s what I am trying to say: what India does does not seem to matter today to the same extent that it did when we were much weaker economically and militarily … At one stage India was the leader of the non-alignment movement. We are now talking of multipolarity, of this and that. Nobody is quite clear where India stands. Nobody is quite clear how India reacts to situations … I think that (once) people saw there was an intrinsic strength that India possessed and they were willing to listen. We still possess that intrinsic strength and probably have much more of it but you are not able to make people see how we stand and where we have the weight to pull … Internally perhaps today we are stronger than we have ever been, economically we are stronger than we have ever been. The question is we have not been able to transmit that to the world at large that we are now in a position to do things elsewhere.”