First Person | Dirty Games

Ghazala Wahab

In one of those cruel twists of destiny, the moment Ladakh--which had been craving separation from the state of Jammu and Kashmir for decades--was made into a Union Territory in August 2019 after the government of India revoked Articles 370 and 35A and dismantled J&K into two UTs, its future got irrevocably intertwined with its former parent state and now a fellow UT.

While delimiting the boundaries of the two newly created UTs, the government had to also define the limits of Indian territory in Ladakh vis a vis China, replacing ambiguity with assertion. China promptly protested India’s unilateralism, rightly pointing out that historically there was no defined boundary between the two countries in this region. Conscious that China had history on its side, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar travelled to China to mollify the leadership there, explaining that India’s creation of border lines on the map did not change the reality on the ground. But China was not convinced.

In the early summer of 2020, just as the snow started to melt, the People’s Liberation Army sauntered into south eastern Ladakh up to the area it had been urging India to recognise as Chinese territory since the late 1950s. It continues to occupy that area, denying access to even local shepherds such as the Champa community to graze their cattle. And so, of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir nearly half is in the occupation of China and Pakistan, inexorably weaving the entire region—Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh--together in one conflict zone; where resolution might only be a matter of deference to shared history and a nod to common future.

The remote and uninhabited eastern and south-eastern parts of Ladakh have for centuries been used as transit by trading caravans from China/ Tibet onwards to Central Asia, through East Turkestan (Chinese province of Xinjiang). Some of these caravans also travelled westwards into Kashmir, before moving north towards Gilgit en route Tajikistan through the Wakhan corridor. Trade spawned cultural, culinary, linguistic and religious linkages weaving this entire region into a tapestry of shared history and heritage.

The British colonialism not only sought to divide the land through arbitrary lines on unilaterally drawn maps, but also introduced elements of xenophobic identities in the region that historically absorbed all influences without the insider-outsider consciousness. Though the retreating British could not enforce their lines in Ladakh, they did succeed in creating distinct identities—religious, regional and linguistic. Hence, despite being regarded as part of the Kashmir province for political and administrative purposes for over a century, a few decades after Independence, the people of Ladakh started to bristle at the attention the Kashmir valley got from the mainstream India. The excessive attention also meant that out of Union government’s largesse for the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh got the smallest share. Worse, the region didn’t even figure in the name of the state, which made allowances for only the two provinces of Jammu and Kashmir. They got to share the state capital too!

The neglect of Ladakh was deliberate. From New Delhi’s perspective, the climatically inhospitable Ladakh was a buffer between India and China, especially after latter’s annexation of Tibet in 1951. Just as the government did not develop areas bordering China, including building of roads, for the fear of People’s Liberation Army using those to intrude into Indian territory, several parts of Ladakh were closed to Indian citizens, forget foreigners. These areas required a special permission from the ministry of defence, called Inner Line Permit, for access. The famous Zanskar Valley itself was opened to Indian tourists only in 1998.

In a topographically challenging—extreme high mountains and narrow deep valleys—and ecologically fragile region, tourism is one of the major means of civilian economic activity. Ladakh was deprived of this for a long time. In 1974, when buoyed by the success of its war against Pakistan in 1971, and China closing its borders with India in Ladakh, the government started to promote tourism, the efforts were constrained by geography. The airport at Leh, Ladakh’s largest town, was (and continues to be, despite a portion being run by Airports Authority of India) designated as a defence airport was operated by