Nonviolent Flotilla
This week I will discuss the flotilla to Gaza as well as two living Indians blessed with extraordinary gifts including courage. One of them has been studying the flotilla. The other is an engineer-architect-teacher with a name not everyone will immediately recognize as Indian – Sonam Wangchuk.
Wangchuk, a 59-year-old native of Ladakh, was arrested on September 26 in his ancestral village several miles from Ladakh’s chief city, Leh, and removed, it appears, to distant Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Two days after his arrest, his wife Gitanjali Angmo was still to receive precise information or be allowed to speak to him on the phone.
Until 2019, Ladakh was a district of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had enjoyed a special relationship with the Indian Union. In 2019, that relationship was terminated. In addition, while J&K was demoted from being a state to a union territory, Ladakh was severed from J&K and made a union territory on its own, to be governed directly from New Delhi, instead of being administered from Srinagar, the J&K capital.
EXCEPTIONAL LADAKH
Possessing a LARGE area (about 23,000 square miles) and, by Indian standards, a tiny population (around 300,000), Ladakh is an exception in India, where humans compete for scarce space. It differs from the rest of India also in its high altitude and in the Tibetan-like ethnicity of half of its population. Physically, Ladakh is surrounded, going clockwise, by (1) J&K, (2) Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, (3) the Beijing-controlled Aksai-Chin territory, (4) China-controlled Tibet, and (5) the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
Inspect Ladakh and its neighbors on a good map. You will be awed.
A man of impressive abilities, of which the most striking is the one that assists people in need, Sonam Wangchuk has found economical ways of providing warmth and shelter at forbidding heights. He is Ladakh’s beloved hero. Also, he was the inspiration for the 2009 movie, 3 Idiots, which stirred audiences across India and beyond. On November 23, 2024, this site carried a major story on Sonam Wangchuk.
When the 2019 changes were imposed by the BJP regime, he felt glad to begin with. Ladakhi lives could now be run by Ladakhis, not by Kashmiris. But rule from Delhi proved more insensitive than rule from Srinagar. Worse, Ladakhis began to notice that the texture of their lives and the very nature of Ladakh were being altered by mainstream India’s hunger for minerals and rare earths, for roads and hotels in crowd-free spaces, and by New Delhi’s unwillingness to entrust Ladakhis with power.
Inability to find jobs added to restiveness. Statehood for Ladakh became a dominant cry, to which Sonam Wangchuk lent his clear, calm voice, insisting on every possible occasion that the Gandhian path of nonviolent satyagraha was the Ladakhis’ only sound option. Another Ladakhi demand was for it to be placed on the Indian constitution’s “Sixth Schedule,” on par with areas in the Northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram, where tribal communities enjoy a degree of autonomy.
On September 24, however, there was arson in Leh, which Wangchuk immediately denounced. Using neither tear gas nor rubber bullets, the union government’s police opened fire. Four Ladakhis were killed. Thereafter Sonam Wangchuk was not only arrested, he was taken under the stringent National Security Act, which means that he can be kept behind bars endlessly without bail or trial. He has been shut away.
PUBLIC TRUST SHAKEN
A top BJP leader from Ladakh has joined in questioning the government's handling of the situation and the killing of four protesters. Demanding a judicial probe, Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, a former MP and the BJP’s face in the region, has said that innocent people have been killed and "sacrifices of our young men must not go in vain". In a letter written to the lieutenant governor of Ladakh, Mr. Namgyal said that “the firing on unarmed protestors has shaken public trust."
Because Wangchuk and his wife Gitanjali Angmo attended a UN-sponsored seminar on climate in Karachi in February this year, a “Pakistani connection” has been insinuated against him. At a September 27 press conference, the director general of Ladakh’s police, S. D. Singh Jamwal, questioned Wangchuk’s “Pakistan visits”.
Gitanjali Angmo told the online portal The Wire that on their Karachi visit Wangchuk was seen as “the pride of India” and had praised Prime Minister Modi’s interest in climate issues.
According to a PTI story published on September 28 in The Telegraph of Kolkata, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of opposition in India’s parliament, denounced Wangchuk’s arrest. In a post on X, Gandhi said, “Ladakh's amazing people, culture, and traditions are under attack by the BJP and RSS. Ladakhis asked for a voice. The BJP responded by killing 4 young men and jailing Sonam Wangchuk. Stop the killing. Stop the violence. Stop the intimidation.”
We can reflect on Gitanjali Angmo’s reaction to her husband’s arrest: “More than [as] his wife, it has pained me extremely as an Indian. He was bringing pride to our country -- an internationally acclaimed educationist, innovator, climate activist who has dedicated his entire life to work for the country. He is a patriot who worked to make the living conditions of the Indian army better and had discouraged people from reading Chinese books and using Chinese products... [T]hat he has been accused of being anti-India actually speaks more about the conscience of our leaders than him.”
“HOUNDED FOR FOUR YEARS”
Stating that the institutions she “co-started with him, be it the Himalayan Institute for Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), or the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), have been hounded for the last four years,” Angmo added: “We have nothing to hide. In fact, between me and Sonam, we annually invest money from our personal wealth to these institutions.”
One reason for the BJP government’s resentment in respect of Ladakh may be the understanding between mostly Buddhist eastern Ladakh and mostly Muslim western Ladakh. The former is dominated by the town of Leh (11,500 feet), the latter by Kargil (8,800 feet).
The Wire reports that the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance have both announced that they will not participate in any talks with the Union government until Wangchuk is released and the curfew that has been imposed in Leh is lifted.
We don’t know what Sonam Wangchuk’s life will henceforth be like in his cell in Jodhpur or wherever he is kept. But history’s eyes are watching how he is being treated, and watching too the rulers who spirited him away.
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The YouTuber Ravish Kumar, the second Indian I am highlighting, was mentioned in this space a week ago for his amazing coverage of Assam’s sorrow over the death of its adored singer, Zubeen Garg. This week I must speak of Ravish’s superb account of the flotilla linked with Greta Thunberg that is trying to reach Gaza with medicine and food.
As I type, the word on the internet is that the Global Sumud Flotilla (sumud, I gather, is Arabic for “not giving up”) is pretty close to the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, where West Asia descends to meet North Africa. It’s the coast where, going north to south, Türkiye, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine (Gaza) and Egypt embrace the Mediterranean Sea.
BLOCKING THE BOATS?
Will Israel try to stop the boats even though they carry no arms? Even though Italy, Spain and Türkiye have said they would protect the flotilla? Even though Trump claims, with Netanyahu sitting next to him, that a peace plan has been accepted by most if not all the disputing parties?
The answer may be known before these words are printed, but whatever that answer is, the flotilla’s eastward progress from Barcelona towards Gaza thus far has formed an arrow of hope for which the world has long waited. A strong salute for Greta and her allies!
Personally I suspect a direct connection between the flotilla’s advance and the activity in the Trump White House. Images of Israeli warships, warplanes, or drones stopping the flotilla would be hard for Netanyahu’s increasingly alienated supporters to swallow. However, I am not discussing Trump’s supposed peace plan, in which Tony Blair, the UK premier from 1997 to 2007, is apparently to be a central figure. Though I have saluted them, the initiators and organizers of the brave flotilla are not my subject either.
Ravish’s report is. For it stirred the journalist in me as also the Indian in me. In next to no time, Ravish had gathered the details that gave his report power. The support the people of Europe, as distinct from their governments, gave to the flotilla idea, including in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. Eagerness, not just willingness, in thousands of “ordinary” people to become the “boat people”. The keenness of thousands of others to provide medicine and food. The assurance of protection that the governments of Spain, Italy, and Turkiye were compelled, because of popular opinion, to offer.
STATE & THE REPORTER
All this and much more was reported by Ravish. Knowing that, unlike India’s godi media, Ravish only has a small team for digging up information within the few short hours he has between his reports, I was amazed at the richness of his findings.
The Indian in me was moved (and also relieved) that an Indian reporter was offsetting official India’s embarrassing silence over the Gaza atrocities. From the 1930s, India, led by Mahatma Gandhi, had objected to the expulsion of Palestinians for creating a new state of Israel. In the 1980s, India was one of the first nations in the world to recognize the Palestinian state. But in recent years India has appeared to forget that there is a thing called fairness or justice which should prevail even between nations. When the Gaza horrors multiplied, establishment India sadly went silent and focused elsewhere.
With the sweat of his magnificent reporting of the flotilla, Ravish has helped salvage India’s good name.
