Wangchuk who went to Pakistan

LAST week, when Ladakh erupted in violence and four persons were shot dead by security forces, police and other officials started blaming Sonam Wangchuk for inciting the protests, describing him as anti-national, while saying that they were also investigating “his visit to Pakistan in February” — as if that was a crime against India by itself.

I know about that visit only too well. He was an invitee to a conference organised by Dawn group, one of Pakistan’s leading media houses. The conference was about tackling climate change. I know about it because I was invited as well. I wrote about the conference in the columns of this newspaper.

That’s where I met Wangchuk for the first time — in Islamabad. Dawn had embarked on an ambitious South Asian project to draw awareness to climate change. The media group brought together people from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and India, making the case that climate change was a challenge that needed an “all of South Asia” approach. After all, the countries in the region are all joined by mountains to the north, rivers and river systems flowing east and west, and coastlines and seas further down. An environmental disaster in one country does not leave its neighbour untouched. When a dust haze settles over Delhi in the winter, Lahore is similarly enveloped. The floods that devastated Punjab caused widespread destruction in the Punjab province of Pakistan too. And so on.

I recall thinking all the time during the two-day conference that this is what SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) might have devoted itself to quite usefully, had it not been so uselessly defunct. After India’s refusal to attend the Islamabad summit in 2016 over the Uri attack, SAARC has died in Delhi’s eyes. BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) became India’s most-favoured go-to alternative regional grouping, but Delhi’s interest in this group too has waned with Sheikh Hasina’s departure from Bangladesh. Now, India has no real friends in the neighbourhood. But that’s another story.

‘Breathe Pakistan’ was the title of the Islamabad conference. Dawn’s publisher Haroon Hameed, who has a fund of interesting stories about his road journeys in India back in the day when this was possible, was the moving force behind it. The venue was the renovated Jinnah Convention Centre, where the SAARC summit would have been held had it taken place, up a small hill past the Diplomatic Enclave.

When I was posted in Pakistan as the correspondent of The Hindu, I heard Karen Armstrong speak at the convention centre on the topic of ‘Tolerance and Islam’. That was in February 2008 when she visited to celebrate the golden jubilee of the Aga Khan, the head of Islami Shia sect of Islam, and Pakistan was grappling with a string of deadly terrorist attacks by then newly-formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

The others in the group from India were Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo, Soumashree Sarkar of The Wire and Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (Harjeet also heads the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation). Soumashree and I were in a panel discussion on focusing media attention on climate change.

Wangchuk was on a panel titled ‘Glacial Melt: A Sustainable Strategy for the Water Towers of South Asia’, where he spoke about the Ice Towers that he helped construct in Ladakh. His panel was chaired by the UN coordinator in Afghanistan, Indrika Ratwatte. The other participants were Kanak Mani Dixit of Nepal, Dechen Tsering of the UNEP Asia-Pacific regional office and Aisha Khan, who heads a civil society coalition on climate change in Pakistan.

During his presentation, Wangchuk explained the ‘Ice Stupa’ concept as the creation of artificial glaciers in the winter, which would melt and provide water in the summer. “Freeze, freeze, and freeze”, he said, and those are the three words I noted down of his speech. I also recall clearly that he showered praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his visionary leadership in tackling climate change.

What actually surprised me most was that no one seemed to know who Wangchuk was. When the panel discussion began, I was seated next to Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in the audience. Wangchuk’s formal introduction contained no hint of his political activism or his hunger strikes. He was introduced as a climate change activist and innovator from Ladakh. So I asked Hamid if he had heard of Wangchuk before.

When he replied in the negative, I asked him if he had seen 3 Idiots, the Aamir Khan movie. He had, and I told him the story, apocryphal or not, that the character played by Khan in the movie was based on him. I also told him about Wangchuk’s padayatra in 2024 from Leh to Delhi for Ladakh’s statehood and other rights.

Ever the newsman, Hamid stood up like a shot, went up close to the dais and began taking photos of Wangchuk. He may have alerted his TV channel as well, for soon after the panel discussion, Wangchuk was surrounded by crews asking him for a ‘byte’. Before that, the only people who seemed to know of him were a group of youth from Gilgit-Baltistan. Wangchuk asked me to take a photo of him with the group. I asked them who they were, and Wangchuk replied: “They are my brothers from the other side”. They all posed in an awkward semicircle next to the stage, with Wangchuk in the middle.

At a get-together after the conference, I asked a senior person in Dawn why they had not given Wangchuk a full-spectrum introduction. He laughed and said: “There was no need. This was a climate conference, saying all that would have shifted the focus”.

Over the last few days, as I thought back on that trip to Islamabad and tried to reconcile it with the accusations about Wangchuk the “anti-national”, I also thought about a government that strung Ladakhis along for over five years on their demand for more agency over their own lives — Sixth Schedule, statehood, demographic protection, rights over their land, the right to representation.

When a five-year-old protest turned violent, and the security forces responded with what seems like disproportionate force, and four people were killed in a place that has remained peaceful, it was easy to shift the blame on “Wangchuk who went to Pakistan”. Officials accused him of inciting protestors by talking about the Arab Spring and Gen Z protests in Nepal. Did no one think of cautioning him when he actually made those speeches, or did the Centre just fail to see that it had turned a peaceful little town into a festering site of people’s grievances and unfulfilled aspirations that was just waiting to burst?

Just over six years ago, on August 5, 2019, Ladakh celebrated the abrogation of Article 370, its freedom from Jammu & Kashmir and its own status as a brand new Union Territory. As we saw last week, so much has changed these past six years.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist.