Ladakh’s struggle for safeguards under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution will continue peacefully despite “the government creating an atmosphere of fear,” says Gitanjali J Angmo, co-founder and CEO of the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh, and the wife of jailed climate activist Sonam Wangchuk.
Wangchuk was detained under the stringent National Security Act (NSA) on 26 September.
Angmo, who recently met a “resilient” Wangchuk in Jodhpur jail, tells The Telegraph Online: “This has only made him more committed to the cause he was fighting for.”
Wangchuk, on a 35-day hunger strike, was leading a protest to demand safeguards under the Sixth Schedule, when the peaceful protests turned violent on 24 September, leaving four dead and over 70 injured.
The grounds of Wangchuk’s detention were “childish, frivolous and false,” Angmo says.
She says that what Wangchuk said in his videos were taken out of context to brand him as an “anti-national” and blame him for the violence.
The detention order, which “doesn’t have an iota of truth”, will be contested “point by point,” she vows.
She questions why such interpretations are being raised now.
“Why now, in the last one month, when for the last 59 years he has worked for the grassroots, for the youth of Ladakh, and for the Indian Army? You cannot suddenly flip from being a complete patriot and nationalist to being an anti-national,” she says.
Wangchuk was only reminding the government of the promises that it had made to the people of Ladakh and “not dissenting,” she insists.
Angmo accuses the administration of using “force and power to silence him,” instead of engaging in dialogue, which is what he, along with the Leh Apex Body (LAB) and the Kargil Democratic Alliance (KAD), have been demanding.
The administration not only tried to put her under “house arrest in Leh” but is also not allowing her to “speak to the media” to tell her side of the story, she alleges.
She says that she was not given what Wangchuk had written challenging the detention order.
“This is just not the way democracy works,” she says.
Asked how the violence and the detention of Wangchuk will impact the protests, she says the region feels like a “graveyard”. She alleges that protesters and those close to her and her husband have been taken into custody and tortured.
“They [the administration] are creating an atmosphere of fear where nobody can stand up for what is right,” she says.
She emphasises that the LAB and KDA “have always stood for peaceful methods of protesting,” and following the “Gandhian path”, they will never “answer a bullet with a bullet.”
Angmo says the protests will continue through dialogue and debate, peacefully. Despite the situation being “temporarily lull because of the curfew, the fight will go on.”
The protests began, she says, once it became clear in 2019 that Ladakh will become a Union Territory without a legislature. “Peaceful protests intensified only after repeated talks failed,” she adds.
The government, Angmo says, would urgently initiate talks when elections were around, but not pay much heed during other times. When the talks actually happened, the administration spoke about flimsy matters and “did not come to the point,” she alleges.
“People’s patience has been tested for five long years,” she says.
Angmo is confident that she will emerge victorious in her fight to release her husband, after which she plans to challenge the cancellation of the FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act) licence of SECMOL (The Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh), and take up other issues that they are facing.
She is also confident that Ladakh will achieve its goal – sooner or later – through legislature or through statehood.
Watch the video for edited excerpts of the full interview.