Ajay Singh

In Balti they call it Siachen — the abode of wild roses. It is a strange name for an icy glacier, 19,000 ft above sea level, where not a blade of grass grows. It is stranger still that this silent, ice-shrouded land should become the highest battleground of the world, where guns have roared since April 1984. Even today, though the guns are silent, Indian and Pakistani armies remain locked in eyeball to eyeball confrontation in these forbidding heights.

The roots of the conflict go back to the 1949 Karachi Agreement signed after the ceasefire of the 1947-48 Indo-Pak War. This demarcated the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan at map coordinate NJ9842 at the foot of the Siachen glacier. Beyond this the line ran ‘thence north to the glaciers’. This ambiguous line was interpreted by Pakistan as running Northeast towards the Karakoram Pass, which gave it control over the glaciers. India claimed that from NJ9842 the line ran along the nearest watershed, the Saltoro Ridge, which put Siachen into Indian territory.

Through all of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies this barren, inhospitable region was ignored by both sides. It was only in the late Seventies that Pakistan published maps showing the area as theirs. They also began issuing permits for mountaineering expeditions, often accompanied by a Liaison Officer of the Pakistan Army, de facto claiming the area as their own.

India awoke to this gambit thanks to the efforts of Col Narender ‘Bull’ Kumar, a skilled mountaineer and Commandant of the High Altitude Warfare School. He laid hands on the map which showed the area as Pakistan’s and decided to counter the Pakistan’s moves by launching mountaineering expeditions of his own. After much persuasion, he received permission to lead his own expedition in 1978. The expedition detected a huge amount of debris with Pakistan Army markings, which convinced him that Pakistan was subtly laying claim to the glacier. He decided to counter Pakistani Oropolitics (use of mountaineering expeditions to stake claim) by a series of Indian expeditions and in 1981, led a 70-man team across the glacier which