As India announced that it had reached an agreement with China on border patrols, activist Sonam Wangchuk, 58, ended one of his many hunger strikes. Local herders, whose movements had already been restricted due to military tensions (which experts say will not abate), fear the construction of a series of energy production projects.
New Delhi (/Agencies) – At a time when Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that they had reached an agreement on patrolling the border between the two countries in the Ladakh region, activist Sonam Wangchuk was ending one of his numerous hunger strikes. An engineer and environmentalist, he has been asking Delhi for years for an autonomous government for Ladakh, so that local tribal populations are in charge of taking care of the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas.
The territory was part of the autonomous region of Kashmir, which in 2019 was stripped of its special status and divided into Jammu and Kashmir – where it voted for its own legislative assembly earlier this month and has since been rocked by a series of attacks in which 13 people died in two weeks – and Ladakh, which came under the control of the central government.
After months of failed negotiations, Sonam Wangchuk, 58, and a group of 150 supporters began a march towards the capital, New Delhi, in early September, covering hundreds of kilometers in a month. They have been calling for years for the government to implement Schedule 6 of the Indian Constitution, which allows a “tribal area” to become an “autonomous district” in which regional councils can be established with the power to independently implement legislative decisions. , judicial, executive and financial in certain areas.
This provision is already in force in the North-Eastern States of India inhabited by various ethnic groups. In Ladakh, as in northeast India, 97% of the population belongs to tribes officially recognized by the government. “Annex 6 gives local people not only the right but also the responsibility to preserve the climate, forests, rivers and glaciers,” Wangchuk had told reporters at a similar rally in January this year.
When they reached Delhi’s borders in early October, the protesters were jailed for several hours. After they were released, Wangchuk and others went on a hunger strike, which ended when the government guaranteed that talks would resume. This is a pattern that has actually been repeated for years and so far has not produced concrete results, but at least it allows Wangchuk to keep the general attention on the region high, commentators say.
In the 1980s he himself experienced the inefficiency of a school system imposed by the central government: “All the textbooks, even those for the first years of primary school, came from Delhi. The examples came from unfamiliar cultures and backgrounds,” says a note posted on the website of a school he co-founded. “These strange examples in strange languages only confused the children of Ladakh.”
With a degree in mechanical engineering, Wangchuk has created a series of useful projects for the local population, such as artificial springs to store water and a mud house that can keep the temperature at 15 degrees when it is -15 degrees outside.
Ladakh has long been at the center of the infrastructure development policies of the Indian government, which views the region as strategic due to its location between Pakistan and China, two rival powers. The construction of roads, energy projects and military infrastructure was recently authorized. “We are not opposed to development. “We want sustainable growth,” Wangchuk said in this regard. The protesters who accompanied the environmental engineer on the march to Delhi claim that these projects do not bring benefits to the local population. “They are exploiting our natural resources. Unemployment is very high. Local businessmen are dissatisfied. “So, who is this development for?” said one protester, Haji Mustafa, to the BBC.
The local shepherds (called changpas) especially fear that renewable energy plants will be built on the Changthang plateauwhich would occupy hundreds of square kilometers of land and could hinder grazing and put an end to their activities. The electricity produced by the plants will be transmitted to the State of Haryana and from there it will be connected to the national grid, but, otherwise, there is no information available on the companies that will develop the project.
During the last five years, access of changpas to pastures has been limited by tensions along the border with China. Delhi and Beijing announced a few days ago that they had reached an agreement on joint border patrols and this morning some Indian defense officials reported that they had started withdrawing equipment from the Demchok and Depsang plains in eastern Ladakh. However, some experts pointed out that they are only tents and temporary buildings, indicating that current military structures will remain intact.
Military commentators have also stressed that the withdrawal that India has talked about in recent days does not amount to a de-escalation of tension: “It means that there will be no more clashes in Depsang and Demchok,” he told Scroll analyst Pravin Sawhney. “It does not imply that China has abandoned the area it occupied in 2020. It only means that they allow us to patrol those areas by informing them in advance. Nothing else”.
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