By: Skye Arundhati Thomas [Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from India.] Published in: *London Review of Books* Date: January 28, 2026
Ladakh is a high-altitude desert that was once a deep-sea bed. When the Tethys Ocean closed 50 million years ago, its floor folded and lifted as the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates collided, forming the Himalayas (they are still growing, nearly a centimetre a year). Ladakh is a landscape of glacial valleys, sand dunes and rock formations (containing copper, lithium, uranium and rare earth minerals). There are geothermal springs in the Puga Valley and alluvial gold deposits in the Shyok River. When snowpacks, glaciers and frozen lakes periodically thaw, fresh water flows to the Indus, Brahmaputra and Ganga rivers, reaching nearly two billion people. It’s one of the world’s most potent water reserves; lately, it’s also of the most prone to drought. In recent summers, perennial springs have gone missing. In the monsoon, though, the rain is overwhelming: in August 2025 it surged by 930 per cent <https://www.indiatoday.in/environment/story/ladakh-rains-floods-monsoon-rainfall-surge-in-ladakh-2781203-2025-09-03> above normal levels. Flash floods carry away livestock, bridges, entire homes. The water lost in one season leads to drought in the next. In 2019, the BJP government revoked Ladakh’s special constitutional protections along with those of Kashmir. Under the euphemisms of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, the privatisation of land, industrialisation and tourism were accelerated. Mining contracts were handed out, as were deals for geothermal and solar energy. Infrastructure projects are underway at sub-zero temperatures. The Solar Energy Corporation of India has requisitioned 48,000 acres of pastureland. It aims to transmit the electricity along a 713-kilometre corridor from Ladakh to Haryana. More than 1600 kilometres of road have been widened or newly constructed. The fourteen-kilometre Zoji-la tunnel is intended to connect Leh, Kargil and Srinagar. In 2022, Pakistani officials reported <https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/930583-india-dumping-millions-of-tonnes-of-rock-loose-soil-in-jhelum> that 17,345 million tonnes of rock, soil and silt from the excavations had been dumped in the Jhelum River. The tunnel is crucial to the Indian government’s defence plans; it’s meant to supply amenities all the way up to the Siachen Glacier, where the Indian Army is garrisoned next to the Chinese border. A similar tunnel under construction in Uttarakhand collapsed in 2023, trapping 41 people. It had been blasted directly into a geological fault line. On 10 September 2025, the environmental activist and community leader Sonam Wangchuk began a 35-day hunger strike, along with fourteen other people, in protest at the collapse of talks between Ladakh and Delhi. On 24 September, as the hunger strikers’ conditions were worsening, demonstrators took to the streets. A group entered a BJP building in Leh and set it on fire. The central government cut off mobile data, imposed a curfew and banned public gatherings. Four protesters were killed with live rounds. Wangchuk, who had appealed for calm, was arrested on 26 September and taken 1300 kilometres from Leh to Jodhpur. In 2015, Wangchuk invented the ‘ice stupa’ <https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326592/sonam-wangchuk/>, a modern take on an ancient glacier-grafting <https://www.adaptation-undp.org/sites/default/files/resources/glof-ii-glaciar_grafting.pdf> technique. By redirecting meltwater from glaciers, Wangchuk has created frozen stupas that reach twelve storeys high and can hold more than twelve million litres of water. His inspiration was a folktale about a mother and father glacier being moved into a cave to create a baby glacier; he often cites this as a way of saying that Indigenous knowledge systems have answers for the future. Similar structures have been created in Chile, Pakistan and Nepal. Since 2019, Wangchuk has worked with the Leh Apex Body and Kargil Democratic Alliance to unite the Buddhists and Muslims of Ladakh, advocating for autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. This grants local councils the legislative and administrative authority to manage land, resources and development projects while preserving tribal identity through the establishment of Autonomous District Councils. Ladakh connects the subcontinent to Central Asia via Afghanistan. Petroglyphs of humped camels and mounted warriors suggest that Ladakh’s trade networks are thousands of years old. Apricot farmers from Baltiyul (now in Pakistan), pashmina shepherds from Changthang (China) or yak herders from Demchok (Tibet) may have once ‘sauntered into these lands absent-mindedly’, Vaijayanti Kharé writes in *Questioning Ladakh*. The Partition of India and the shutdown of the Sino-Tibetan border mean that Ladakh can now be accessed only from India. Since the 2020 cross-border skirmishes with China, the Indian Army has intensified its presence. The National Thermal Power Corporation joined hands with the Indian Army to supply remote outposts with ‘round-the-clock’ green energy. In 2022, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation abruptly halted a geothermal energy project in the Puga Valley. Geothermal fluid was leaking into the river, a tributary of the Indus; the closest village was only two and a half kilometres away. The project was later relaunched in collaboration with the Icelandic GeoSurvey. The Modi government’s approach to the Indian peripheries, especially those on the Himalayan belt – Kashmir, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Assam – is to manufacture consent for rapid militarisation by framing these regions as politically unstable. Militarisation goes hand in hand with industry. A pattern has emerged: special protections are dismantled, local leaders are delegitimised, resistance is branded as terrorism and met with force. But Indigenous protest movements endure across the country: the Lepcha community in Sikkim mobilises to protect the sacred Teesta River; in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills, the Dongria Kondh have successfully stalled bauxite mines. The Adivasi struggle against coal mining in the Hasdeo Arand forest in Chhattisgarh continues despite court rulings against their right to land, as does the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, which invokes constitutional provisions to resist dispossession. A 350-kilometre protest march arrived in Jodphur this week, demanding Wangchuk’s release.
