Ladakhi Buddhists’ embrace of the Sangh Parivar, once driven by a longing for Union Territory status, has been unravelling rapidly amid a brewing cultural confrontation.
Choglamsar and Shey, two adjoining villages on the banks of the Indus just outside Leh town, are where the roots of the now-fading bonhomie were once laid. Now, they symbolise the Buddhists’ growing disenchantment with the RSS-BJP.
Choglamsar is home to the Dalai Lama’s summer teaching ground, the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies. Thousands of Tibetan refugees settled here after the 1959 uprising.
Shey has a famed monastery as well as a 17th-century palace built by King Deldan Namgyal, who turned the village into his summer capital. It stands as a reminder to the residents of their independent status before Dogra forces from Jammu captured the region in the 19th century.
It’s among these cultural symbols that the advocates of Hindutva found a toehold three decades ago.
This came in the form of the Sindhu Darshan Festival that was meant to bridge the region’s Buddhist present with its purported Hindu past, and schools run by saffron-affiliated bodies. The effort found help from large segments of the then Buddhist leadership.
Evidence of how the relationship has soured came on September 24 when the BJP office became the main target of the statehood violence in Leh town and went up in flames. Several party leaders went into hiding.
Ladakh Buddhist Association president Chering Dorjay claimed that some BJP leaders had taken shelter in a local Indo-Tibetan Border Police camp, and regretted they were resisting appeals to resign.
River politics
A sprawling pavilion at Shey overlooking the Indus hosts the annual Sindhu Darshan Festival, launched in 1997 by L.K. Advani, then in the Opposition.
This was a year after Advani’s “chance discovery” of the river: Someone had informed him that the river flowing past Leh town was the mighty Indus, known locally as the Sindhu. Advani’s surprise at learning that a part of the Indus flowed through India earned him public ridicule.
“The then chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, attended the festival in 2000. The story goes that Advani asked Farooq for land,” a local politician said.
“Farooq said, ‘The entire land, as far as you can see, belongs to you.’ But no sooner had they (Advani and his team) left than he (Farooq) told the local Buddhist leadership not to give them an inch. Somehow they managed (to acquire) the land.”
In 2001, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee inaugurated the grand pavilion at Shey, the village selected by RSS leaders Indresh Kumar and Ajal Jamwal. In 2020, a helipad came up nearby.
“Some people queried the existence of the Sindhu in India as described in our national anthem, but little did they know that it flows from our soil in Ladakh,” Vajpayee famously said in 2000.
The festival, held in June, attracts the country’s top dignitaries every year. A memorial at the site shows Prime Minister Narendra Modi among those offering prayers there. Also seen is former BJP parliamentarian Thupstan Chewwang, one of the leaders of the statehood campaign.
But local participation has in recent years declined to a trickle. “We don’t go there. These things are not part our culture,” Nawang Chimbey, a monk from Shey, said.
Sangh schools
Another major RSS initiative here is the Ladakh Kalyan Sangh, a socio-educational organisation.
It runs a network of schools in Leh under the local name Phanday Tshogpa, including one at Choglamsar, Dorjay said. He added that apart from the Choglamsar school, the rest were non-functional.
Vijay Kumar Chellingpa, associated with the Choglamsar-based Bhartiya Vidya Niketan school, denied it had any links with the BJP-RSS or the local branch of the Kalyan Sangh.
He said the school, along with another in Kargil, was run by the Vidya Bharati, which has a network of thousands of schools across the country.
Chellingpa said the Vidya Bharati ran some 60 informal schools across Ladakh, and that 42 of its former students had joined the army.
RSS mouthpiece Organiser explicitly refers to Vidya Bharati as its educational wing.
Lundup Dorjai, Congress councillor from Skurbuchan, said most Ladakhis now stayed away from the Sindhu Darshan and the RSS-run schools.
“Initially, maybe some people did go to the Sindhu Ghat but in recent years, only BJP men have been going there,” he said. “As for the schools, maybe they are attracting the children of impoverished families.”
He suggested the BJP-RSS “have a plan to change the demography of this place”.
Activism roots
From its outset in the 1930s, Ladakhi Buddhists’ activism, according to scholar Martijn Van Beek, was “strongly informed by outsiders (Right-wing Hindu groups) and their understanding of the Indian political system as well as what they thought was good for Ladakhi Buddhists”.
One of their key complaints was the “growing” numbers of Muslims against the “low birth rate among Buddhists”.
The first Buddhist organisation in the then princely state, Beek says, was floated by some Kashmiri Pandit converts to Buddhism.
They “secured the sole right to represent Buddhists for (the entire) state from Ladakh’s foremost religious leader Shushok Stangtsang Raspa of Hemis Monastery”.
Over the last decade, the Buddhists overwhelmingly cosied up to the BJP, helping the party win the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls from the region. The BJP also rules the Leh Autonomous Hill Development Council.
But recently, the autonomous council installed a statue of the Buddha at the site to placate local sensitivities.
Dorjay, however, regretted that tilaks were being applied on such statues, calling it un-Buddhist.
As head of the hill council, Dorjay said, he had changed the official name of the river to Singhey Khabab, its Ladakhi translation, and that of the festival to Ladakh Singhey Khababs.
He said the Sangh Parivar’s goal was to change the region’s demography. He cited the instance of Spiti in Himachal, which was once“100 per cent Buddhist” but more than half of whose population has converted to Hinduism.
“We are resisting that…. We will not allow it to happen here,” Dorjay said.