In flexing its military muscle, India is finally set to act on pleas to unite this isolated region with the rest of the country.
Due to its proximity to the long-contested Indo-Chinese frontier, Ladakh would seem to be of significant strategic importance for India. Yet for all the pledges and proposals made by Indian lawmakers over the years to build infrastructure of the area, it is only recently that New Delhi has finally started to inch towards fulfilling these promises. As is perhaps to be assumed, it has been military motives that have finally led policymakers to begin putting real money behind their promises. But with new roads and what appears to be an incredibly ambitious railway project – the first of its kind – now on the anvil promising to connect Ladakh to the rest of India, it is Ladakhis themselves who could well benefit the most.
The first signs of movement came last year when, after more than four decades of closure, the Indian Air Force revived two old airbases in the eastern part of Ladakh. These bases were certainly well-situated from a military perspective – Daulat Beg Oldi and Fukche are, respectively, just eight and two-and-a-half kilometres south of the Line of Actual Control – and thus offer an understandable first step in re-opening the region. In recent weeks, reconstruction work has also begun on the Neoma base, slightly farther inland, which will likely be operational by the end of the year. (The Air Force is also planning to reopen the Chushul airfield, in the same area, in the near future.) All three bases were built to facilitate troop movement in the run-up to the 1962 war between India and China, but were abandoned by the Indian Army in 1966, after an earthquake damaged the airstrips.
Since then, New Delhi seemed to have all but forgotten Ladakh. Some suggest that these four decades of negligence might even have resulted from the prevailing insecurity, including in defence circles, that India would eventually lose ground to future Chinese aggression, thus leading to a moratorium in development projects. According to this logic, then, the current refocusing on Ladakh could subsequently have more to do with a new mindset in New Delhi than on anything happening on the ground in Kashmir or China itself. Indeed, the recently revived interest in Ladakh is being seen by many as a re-assertion of Indian military strength in the borderlands. "India is a growing power and it has to assert itself," says Phunchok Stobdan, a defence analyst in New Delhi. "Gone are the days when New Delhi was thinking that it had to vacate Ladakh for China. Now it has started thinking in terms of building infrastructure in the region. I see it more as New Delhi's posture of asserting itself in the region."