The Dispute over 'Mountain Rose'
Siachen is the world's highest battlefield with gunfire being exchanged at 16,000 to 20,000 feet above sea level. Nine out of ten deaths on the Siachen are due to climate with only one being combat-related. It is no wonder then that the Siachen dispute between India and Pakistan is described as one of the most futile and wasteful in the world both in material and human terms.
The defence secretaries of India and Pakistan have met eight times to discuss the Siachen dispute in an attempt to resolve it -- their last meeting being in August 2004. Twice the two sides came close to settling the dispute but the political climate was perhaps not right to reach a settlement. The solutions proposed include demilitarisation of the glacier and of creating a 'Zone of Disengagement'. However, mutual lack of trust has prevented a resolution of the dispute.
Siachen invokes strong passions in both India and Pakistan. It is the stuff of legends. It was for the brand rub-off offered by it that former Defence Minister of India George Fernandez visited the Glacier often on New Year's Eve or Christmas. For most Indians Siachen, symbolises unparalleled gallantry, bravery and a commitment to protect national interest. This was why the nation was shocked to know that last year some army officers had fabricated video evidence of fake encounters with Pakistani soldiers in the Siachen area to secure gallantry awards.
Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf's 'Siachen consciousness' is also very high. In September, 1987, as brigade commander of the Special Services Group, he was responsible for leading an attack on an Indian position at Bilafond La, one of the two main passes on the Soltoro ridge (the other being Sia La - 'La' means a mountain pass) to the Siachen Glacier from Pakistan-administered Kashmir. His forces had to retreat. Having also served as Pakistan's Commander of Northern Areas, he knows the Siachen dispute intimately.
Although the boundary dispute between India and Pakistan in this region is referred to as the Siachen dispute, the Siachen Glacier is in fact under Indian control. There is no battle raging on the glacier itself. Indian soldiers sit on the Soltoro ridge to the west of the Siachen Glacier (see map at end of article). Between the Pakistani forces and the Glacier, therefore, there are high mountain peaks controlled by India.
The Siachen Glacier flows in the valley formed by the Soltoro ridge to its west and the Eastern Karakorams. It is about 72 km long from its highest point at Indira Col to its snout. It gets its name from the wild mountain roses that grow near its snout. Siachen is the source of the Nubra River that meets the Shyok River, originating from the Eastern Karakorams, at Thois. Later, it feeds into the Indus.
Militarily, the Siachen Glacier can be divided into three parts. The Northern Glacier is the most difficult, containing the highest peaks. The Central part is where the glacier is broadest -- up to 20 km wide and this is where India has its Kumar Post from where expeditions are launched to the various Soltoro peaks. The Southern Glacier is narrow -- only four to five km wide. Helicopters maintain the entire Northern and Central Glacier while ponies and porters supply the Southern Glacier. There are stretches of a fair-weather road that also services the glacier.
The Indian army has taken 105 mm field guns to the glacier to support the peaks. They had to be knocked down for transport and reassembled. They are deployed at the lower end of the Northern glacier and in the Southern glacier. The Base Camp has 130 mm and the Bofors 155 mm guns. The difficulty in using field guns on the glacier arises from shifting ice which moves by about two inches a day in winters and 10 to 20 feet a day in summer. Registering a target and using the calculations to shoot after even a couple of days will not guarantee a hit because of shifting gun positions. At present three battalions of the Indian army are deployed in the Siachen region -- one each in the northern, central and southern parts of the glacier. At any point of time three battalions are deployed, three are in training and three awaiting orders. The soldiers manning the observation posts on the Soltoro and the camps have to be relieved every 30 days to three months.
The estimates of the costs of hostilities on Siachen vary. Lt. General (Retd) V. R. Raghavan in his definitive work 'Siachen - Conflict without end' says: 'No one has an accurate assessment, but everyone has a figure to quote and a point to make.' Without endorsing any estimate, he quotes cost figures ranging from US $ 1.2 million per day for both India and Pakistan; US$ 1.94 million a day for India alone; and Rs. 2.5 crore to Rs. 6.5 crore for India alone to US$ 18.5 million a day for Pakistan and thirty times that for India. Pakistan's former foreign secretary Shaharyar Khan once said that the cost of a roti (bread) for a Pakistani soldier posted in that region is more than Rs. 450. George Fernandes told the Indian Parliament that Siachen costs the exchequer Rs. three crore per day.
The Siachen dispute originated because the boundary in Jammu & Kashmir, after the Karachi Agreement of 1949, was not fully demarcated. A ceasefire line (CFL) on the map ended at a grid point with co-ordinates NJ-9842 on the Soltoro ridge. This was near the northern-most point where troops were deployed when the fighting ended in 1948. Although the CFL subsequently changed into the Line of Control (LoC) after the Simla Agreement of 1972, its end points remained the same.
The
descriptive explanation of the boundary beyond NJ-9842 -- 'thence North to the Glaciers' -- has created confusion. India believes that this means that the boundary would go north through the nearest watershed, the Soltoro ridge. Pakistan draws a straight line from NJ-9842 going northeast to the Karakoram pass. The former interpretation gives the control of the Glacier to India, the latter, to Pakistan.
In 1978, the Indian army became aware of maps showing the LoC as a straight line extended from NJ-9842 to the Karakoram pass appearing in publications abroad. The same year an Indian army mountaineering expedition led by Colonel N. Kumar, brought back evidence of foreign mountaineering expeditions being launched into the Siachen area from Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Kumar's expedition also did not go unnoticed. Both sides were convinced that the other was trying to establish a military presence in the area. New Delhi and Islamabad began exchanging protest notes asking the other to desist from entering its territory. It was then that India realised that Pakistan was behind the extension of NJ-9842 to the Karakoram pass, claiming the Siachen glacier. India objected to this 'cartographic aggression' as it meant Pakistan claiming territory up to the Karakoram pass and preparing the ground for involving China in the India-Pakistan dispute.
The Indian Army believed that the choice before it was either to be blind to this activity or pre-empt Pakistan. In late 1983, India had intelligence that Pakistan was also purchasing large quantities of high altitude gear and its troops were planning to occupy the passes leading to the Siachen Glacier. Two months before the mountaineering season was to begin in April 1984, India airlifted two platoons of Kumaon Regiment and placed them on the two key passes of Bilafond La and Sia La on the Soltoro ridge. Pakistan had been effectively pre-empted. Both India and Pakistan see geo-political compulsions in fighting for Siachen. In 1963, Pakistan ceded 4,500 sq km of Kashmir, the Shaksgam Valley to the west of the Karakorams, to China because it wanted a border with China. But India believes that the disputed territory of the former princely state of Jammu & Kashmir was not Islamabad's to give away. India, therefore, did not recognise this settlement. However, New Delhi came to know of the Chinese activities in the area only a decade after China had built the Aksai Chin highway passing through it. The belated Indian presence on the Soltoro ridge abutting the Shaksgam Valley seeks to question the Sino-Pakistan 'border settlement'.
If there is no military presence on the Soltoro ridge, Indian military experts argue, then India would be blind to any activity inimical to its interests in and around the Soltoro ridge, in the eastern Karakorams and in what the Indian Army calls 'Sub-sector North' abutting the eastern Karakorams but contiguous to the Shaksgam Valley. Satellite pictures and air surveillance, they argue, provide only images but it is physical observation which indicates an adversary's intent. Initially, the Siachen conflict was also justified in terms of countering a threat to Ladakh from Pakistani forces coming down the Nubra Valley via Siachen. This is now considered logistically unviable.
That Siachen rankles in the Pakistani mind is evident from the fact that the Kargil misadventure, some in Pakistan claim, was aimed at undoing the Indian takeover of Siachen. One of its objectives apparently was to snatch Siachen from India by cutting off the Srinagar-Leh highway.
India and Pakistan have held eight rounds of talks on the Siachen dispute. They apparently came close to resolving the dispute in 1989 and then again in 1992. These attempts were unsuccessful because of two reasons: first, Pakistan wants India to withdraw to pre-Simla positions by vacating the Soltoro ridge but wants to retain its own military positions claiming that they are pre-1971; and second, to keep up the myth of engaging India on the Siachen glacier, it refuses to exchange maps marking the present ground positions. These would show that Pakistan is nowhere near the Siachen glacier and that its posts on the Soltoro are at much lower heights (9,000 to 15,000 feet) than India's.
Was there really a settlement in the offing in 1989?
American scholar Robert Wirsig has claimed that India made six proposals to Pakistan in 1989: cessation of cartographic aggression by Pakistan (i.e. extending the LoC from NJ-9842 northeast to the Karakoram pass); establishing a demilitarised zone at the Siachen glacier; exchanging maps to show present positions on the ground; delimiting the border beyond NJ-9842 towards the China border based on ground realities; formulating ground rules for future military stand-off - a measure of last resort; and redeploying Indian and Pakistani forces to mutually agreed positions.
Pakistan apparently countered this with two alternative proposals: deployment of Indian and Pakistani forces to mutually agreed positions held at the time of the 1971 ceasefire (pre-Simla positions); and only then, the delimitation of an extension of the LoC beyond NJ-9842.
There were differences over which should come first -- delimitation or the redeployment of forces. Re-deployment was seen as entirely an Indian withdrawal with Pakistan staying put. India was unwilling to accept demilitarisation to mean only an Indian pullout.
The sixth round of Siachen talks in 1992 also raised hopes for a solution. India claimed that there was a broad understanding on the redeployment of Indian and Pakistani troops and on creating a 'Zone of Disengagement' on either side of the Soltoro ridgeline -- although Pakistan was still unwilling to mark its current deployment on a map indicating the ground reality before disengagement. Whatever hopes that Indian officials had for a settlement even then were dashed when they approached the political leadership. The Zone of Disengagement Plan did not find political acceptance with Narasimha Rao's minority government.
In the seventh round of talks in November 1998, India referred only to the Soltoro range with no mention of the Siachen glacier. The proposal for a Zone of Disengagement was also dropped.
The 1998 proposals, instead, suggested a comprehensive ceasefire along the Soltoro region based on a freeze of the ground positions; discussions of the modalities of ceasefire in a definite time-frame; bilateral mechanisms for the ceasefire including flag meetings and hotlines between divisional commanders; and authenticating the existing position on the Soltoro range beyond NJ-9842. Pakistan rejected the proposals. The Indian position had clearly hardened in the face of Pakistan's refusal to recognise the ground reality.
The army has the dominant say in the Siachen dispute.
The Indian army's position is that there should be no asymmetrical redeployment of troops. There is no glacier on the Pakistani side. To climb up the Soltoro peaks Pakistani army does not have to traverse a glacier - just mountaineering is enough. If there is a pullback by the Indian army to say, Leh or Turtuk but the Pakistanis stay in Skardu; then they can occupy the key positions on the Soltoro ridge in ten days' time. It would take India three to four months to do that.
Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, has apparently assured India that, should demilitarisation take place, his army would not reoccupy the crucial passes on the Soltoro ridge. However, after Pakistan's Kargil misadventure, his assurances are likely to be taken with a pinch of salt in India. All the same, the two sides have agreed to engage in a military-to-military dialogue to explore ways of disengaging from the Siachen Glacier and this may be a movement forward.
There have also been proposals for converting the Siachen Glacier area into a science park -- an environmental zone, jointly managed by both India and Pakistan. However, till such time as the entire area is demilitarised without either side feeling defeated, these proposals can only remain pipedreams.
South Asian Journal
