In response to the Indian government’s decision to revoke the region’s special rights and status as a state, hundreds of Kashmiris were detained on August 5, 2019.
Sonam Wangchuk celebrated, and thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He thanked Ladakh for living up to its long-awaited dream, he wrote in “THANK YOU PRIME MINISTER” on X and then tweeted.
One of India’s best-known innovators and education reformers, Wangchuk was referring to a decades-long demand from many in Ladakh, for the cold desert bordering China to be separated from Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-administered part of the disputed region that Pakistan also claims. Ladakh was a part of Jammu and Kashmir up until August 2019. With the Modi government’s move, it had been made a separate administrative entity, a so-called union territory to be governed federally by New Delhi.
However, Ladakh was not permitted to retain a locally elected legislature while the rest of Jammu and Kashmir, which was also deemed to be a union territory from a state, was. That lack of any say over their future would slowly turn the peaceful Ladakh into a tinderbox of political unrest against Modi’s government in the subsequent six years. And Wangchuk, who is disillusioned, is the one who leads that protest movement.
On September 26, Wangchuk was arrested and transported more than a thousand miles from home to jail in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, charged with “anti-national” activities, conspiring to overthrow the government, after a breakaway group from his protest engaged in violent clashes with security forces. Four protesters were shot dead by Indian paramilitary soldiers after they allegedly set up Wangchuk’s local office in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
The same BJP and Modi government had previously turned to Wangchuk for promotional campaigns in Ladakh. His educationist advice was sought by BJP-led governments in other states. Today, that one-time poster child, the inspiration for one of Bollywood’s most iconic and successful movies ever, stands accused of treason — with officials imputing a possible Pakistan hand behind his campaign for constitutional rights for Ladakh.
The same government that was painting him is now calling him an anti-national, Wangchuk’s wife, Gitanjali Angmo, reported to Al Jazeera.  , “The writing is on the wall: this is to silence him, to scare him because they could not buy him”.
‘ Grief in Leh ‘
Local Ladakh activists led by Wangchuk launched a hunger strike in the first few days of September. It was the latest in a series of peaceful protests they had held in recent years demanding constitutional protections under what is known as the Sixth Schedule. Territories of India with a majority of indigenous tribes have autonomy in terms of government and governance. More than 90 percent of Ladakh’s population consists of such tribes.
However, some youth-led demonstrators broke away from the BJP office in Leh, Ladakh’s capital, on September 24 and tore the building. Security forces fired back: Four people, including a veteran soldier, were killed and dozens were left injured. The administration then strewn in a massive crackdown, detaining more than 80 people, including protest leaders who had previously been on a peaceful hunger strike.
Wangchuk was arrested under the National Security Act, a preventive detention law that allows imprisonment without trial for a year. In support of Wangchuk and other detainees, more than a dozen neighborhood activists turned themselves in to the police.
It was the worst violence and crackdown in the modern history of Ladakh.
Wangchuk and other people had joined the hunger strike as did Stanzin Dorje, a Leh native businessman in his late 30s. But amid the crackdown, he was — like the rest of Ladakh — restricted to his home under an unprecedented curfew-like deployment of armed forces on the streets of Leh. According to his friends, Dorje’s state of mind grew more and more sluggish.
On Wednesday, Stanzin died by suicide. His wife and two children are also present.
“He was Sonam’s fan. He kept asking about him and even taking his name, according to Tsering Dorje, president of the Ladakh Buddhist Association, a prominent protest group. Stanzin was also a member of the association’s general council. He experienced extreme agitation and depressed feelings. We are all asking, ‘ What was]Wangchuk’s] crime? He was simply sat there. Why did they arrest him and send him to a jail outside]Ladakh]”? Dorje remarked.
Wangchuk’s rise from an engineer next door to an icon of Indian ingenuity and sustainable living made him a local icon, Dorje said, where young people looked up to him. He continued, “We are all grieving in Leh for our people, whether they were killed or imprisoned.”
A national hero
Till the age of nine, Wangchuk was homeschooled by his mother, Tsering Wangmo, in Uleytokpo, a mountain village 70 kilometers from Leh. In 1975, when his father, Sonam Wangyal, a politician, became a minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government, the family moved to Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.
Wangchuk struggled in Srinagar schools because he only spoke Ladakhi while attending classes were taught Urdu and Kashmiri. So he , moved to a school in New Delhi for high school, and went on to study mechanical engineering at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar. He and other students started the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh in 1988, and shortly afterward he co-founded the alternative school model SECMOL, or Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh.
Until then, nearly 95 percent of Ladakhi students failed their state exams amid a struggle with the curriculum which was in Urdu — a language alien to many in Ladakh — and other cultural barriers. When Kashmir became a unified entity, Urdu, which is spoken much more frequently, was the state’s dominant language.
At SECMOL, the number of students clearing 10th grade rose from 5 percent to 55 percent in seven years, and then to 75 percent. With only one admissions criterion: a failing grade in regular schools, Wangchuk also founded SECMOL Alternative School Campus near Leh. At SECMOL, students were taught through hands-on, experiential methods, like running radio stations, farming, repairing machines, and managing the campus themselves.
He received the Governor’s Medal from Jammu and Kashmir in 1996 for his efforts to “reform Ladakh’s educational system.”
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, Wangchuk’s father, Wangyal, also staged multiple hunger strikes for the recognition of Ladakh’s communities as Indigenous tribes.
In a symbolic gesture to end one of those hunger strikes, then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi flew to Leh in 1984 to offer Wangyal a soft drink. She made the commitment to acknowledge the tribal status of the communities in Ladakh.
In the years after Wangchuk established SECMOL in Leh, the son too gained national fame. He  gained notoriety for innovations like solar tents for Indian soldiers stationed in the Himalayas and artificial glaciers to store water in the winter.
Wangchuk also became known as a climate activist, promoting sustainability, said Manshi Asher, a researcher working in the Himalayan region on environmental justice issues for over 25 years.
Wangchuk has won numerous prizes and titles along the way, including the 2018 Asian Nobel Prize and the Magsaysay Award from the Philippines.
His approach to education inspired the much-celebrated character Phunsukh Wangdu, played by superstar Aamir Khan in the film 3 Idiots. Khan was depicted as a unique genius who defied conventional education, challenged rigid classrooms, and demonstrated that genuine education lay in curiosity.
The film’s takeaway — that brilliance comes from questioning the system rather than topping it — resonated far beyond India. It became one of Bollywood’s biggest international hits, especially in China, where the story captivated students taking competitive exams and sparked debates about the merits of education.
Now, Wangchuk is being accused of more than just breaking with the mould. He is accused of challenging the Indian state for itself.
Ladakh police chief SD Singh Jamwal has said that Wangchuk is under investigation after what he described as “credible inputs” suggesting links to Pakistan, claiming that an arrested Pakistani intelligence operative last month had allegedly circulated videos of Wangchuk’s protests.
Insinuating links to Islamabad, New Delhi’s arch enemy, Wangchuk traveled to Pakistan to attend an event organized by the Dawn media group in collaboration with the UN.  , At the climate conference in Islamabad, Wangchuk had, in fact, praised Modi’s efforts at tackling climate change.
His arrest only serves to furtheraggravate the Ladakh crisis. Local groups leading the protests have withdrawn from the talks with the Modi government, demanding an unconditional release of detainees, including Wangchuk, and compensation for those killed in the firing by security forces.
How could we not agitate if the government doesn’t fulfill our demands? asked Dorje, of the Ladakh Buddhist Association. Our countrymen have died. Our people and leaders are in jail now. What other options are there currently?”
“Into the fire, out of pan.”
Despite his focus on educational reforms and conservation, Wangchuk had increasingly started to take political positions in recent years.
In Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in 2020, Wangchuk urged people to boycott Chinese goods after Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed. In 2023, he announced a climate fast at Khardung La, one of the highest motorable passes in the world, to underline the climate change impact on the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas. He was held in a house arrest.
Then, next year, he announced a fast until death for the demand of constitutional safeguards for Ladakh — taking on New Delhi directly, calling out the industrial mining lobby. In addition, he was in charge of the “Pashmina March” that year, a protest against threats to pastoral livelihoods.
A week before his arrest in September, Wangchuk recalled his elation in August 2019, when the Modi government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. However, he later realized that “we were out of the fire pan, into the fire,” he claimed in a video statement.
Ladakh, he said, had been left “with no forum of democracy”.
According to Asher, the fusion of climate activism and daily politics was inevitable.
“In a centralised and top-down decision-making of the capitalist and extractive economic model, where corporate interests are prioritised and the state has the eminent domain, people and ecologies from where resources are extracted lose out”, Asher told Al Jazeera. The need for democratic and decentralized governance and protective policies are at odds with the concern for sustainability in this context.
So, Asher added, the demands for greater autonomy were intricately linked to the climate threats that the region and its people face.
A person can look away from politics in a society, Sajad Kargili, a core member of the Kargil Democratic Alliance, another organization currently in Ladakh, said. “Politics would never leave that person,” Kargili said. “Sooner or later, the politics had to catch up with Sonam Wangchuk, he cannot escape that because of his innovator past. Naturally, politics catches up with him.
Kargili said that he does not agree with Wangchuk on his politics. We are also his biggest supporters today, Kargili told Al Jazeera, “because we share a sincere struggle for our rights,” Kargili continued.
By framing Ladakhi leaders as ‘ anti-nationals’, the Modi government was playing with fire, Kargili said. It is crucial to keep people on board because Ladakh is a sensitive border region close to China and Pakistan, he said. “With this iron-fist approach, the government is alienating the people of Ladakh — and there is growing mistrust among the people now”.
Kargili claimed that other Ladakh leaders were getting ready to be detained at any time.
“Ticking time bomb,”
Angmo, Wangchuk’s wife and co-founder of Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), said that her husband’s arrest came after a months-long “witch hunt” by authorities against her husband’s movement — threats to donors, intimidating visits by investigating agencies, and the cancellation of licenses needed to receive foreign donations.
Despite this, Angmo predicted that the movement would survive.
Angmo is now juggling enquiries from security agencies, court cases and trying to keep SEMCOL and HIAL afloat. Additionally, two of their employees are being held in custody alongside other leaders.
In a press statement on Tuesday, September 30, the Ladakh administration said that Wangchuk “had suggested ‘ overthrow ‘ of government on lines of ‘ Arab Spring’, if their demands were not met … On multiple occasions, he suggested self-immolation by Ladakhis on lines of protests in Tibet”.
The Ladakh government attributed Mr. Wangchuk to the Leh violence that resulted in four fatalities, saying that “mr. Wangchuk made no attempts to ensure peace” despite other Leh Apex Body leaders (including elders) rushing to pacify the violent crowd. The apex body is a coalition of political, religious, and community groups in Leh that came together to demand constitutional safeguards for the border region.   ,
“There is no question of witch-hunting or smoke screen. The law enforcement organizations’ actions are based on reliable sources and documents. The agencies should be allowed to continue with their investigation impartially without vitiating the process”, the Ladakh administration said in its statement.
The government’s attack on her husband and other protesters poses a threat to “turn Ladakh into a ticking time bomb,” like Indian-administered Kashmir, where the region has been hampered by decades of crackdowns and alleged human rights violations.
“Why are they bent upon making Ladakh into Kashmir”? she inquired.
But, most of all, she said, she was worried for her husband. As part of its decision to hold a hearing on a petition she has filed against her husband’s prosecution on October 14, the Indian Supreme Court on Monday requested that the Modi government talk about sharing the specifics of Wanchuk’s arrest with Angmo.
Source: Aljazeera
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