There is likely to be much more democratic discussion before the new districts’ proposal is inked.
THE August 26 tweet by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, announcing five new districts in Ladakh, had all the panache of grand declarations. It was a bolt from New Delhi’s muddy-blue sky. A surprise — cryptic, populist and authoritative — it lacked other details despite the transformational potential of the proposed administrative exercise.
The initial Ladakhi reaction was surprised curiosity, which grew to become suspicion and, within a couple of days, evolved to a mild protest in Sankoo, one of the areas directly impacted by the proposal. This latest development in Ladakh, therefore, needs to be discussed and understood in its historical and political context. First, the historical chronology.
Ladakh’s population was barely 2 per cent of the erstwhile state of J&K. In its first phase after the Dogra divestiture began in 1954, citizens of what is now Leh district expressed their desire to secede from the then state of J&K, but without legal or institutional definition of what that meant. The genesis of this demand was the fear for the vulnerability of Ladakh’s linguistic, cultural and religious identities. After the 1962 war, however, this intra-state dissent lay beneath the surface, although, on occasion, overtly expressed in the language of ethno-political polemics.
This changed dramatically in 1989, as Ladakh’s opposition to the increasingly demonised Kashmiri became shrill and confessional. In the district of Leh, there was even an anti-Ladakhi Muslim phase, bordering on Islamophobia, that lingered for some time. The 1979 division of Ladakh into two districts, Leh and Kargil, did not help in stemming this trend. These two watershed events served to intensify an older, more complex rivalry between Kargil and Leh, but this time with communal overtones. Leh and Kargil, predictably, drifted further apart economically, socially and politically.
The third phase of this drift between Leh and Kargil came with the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, which inducted a Hindu-majoritarian BJP government at the Centre. During the elections, the BJP promised Ladakh Union Territory (UT) status, a specific demand that was first cogently articulated in 2002 and pursued as a concrete agenda since. Thupstan Chhewang, one of Ladakh’s seniormost activists and respected politicians, was elected on the BJP ticket as Ladakh’s sole Member of Parliament. However, either because of a priori intent or later neglect, the BJP’s promised UT status remained undelivered. Procrastination planted the seeds of pessimism.
The latter part of this same phase saw Ladakhis assertively research the UT model and other governance structures in the eastern Himalaya and, with a growing perception that the BJP had let them down. This sentiment gathered steam in 2018 when Chhewang resigned as Ladakh’s MP and from his primary membership in the BJP. Regardless, the BJP remained popular in Ladakh where it once again won the 2019 parliamentary seat. Moreover, in 2020, the party swept the Hill Development Council elections. Despite these victories, even in 2019, an empowered UT with meaningful governing powers remained undelivered, spawning murmurs and protests in Ladakh.
The Home Minister’s recent virtual edict on X (formerly Twitter) and a bulked version of it with no real additional information from the PIB (Press Information Bureau) heralds the fourth phase in Ladakh’s modern politics. This structure suggests seven districts for Ladakh, including the extant ones of Leh and Kargil. The proposed five new districts are Zangskar, Drass, Sham, Nubra and Changthang. But initial inquiries suggest that the decision was made without consulting the leadership of Leh’s Apex Body or Kargil’s KDA (Kargil Democratic Alliance) bloc, even as both have been in prickly negotiations with New Delhi for over a year now. However, Ladakhis have learnt that ostensibly favourable announcements can be deceptive, as illustrated by the 2023-24 anti-BJP protests and that party’s dramatic loss in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Indeed, there have already been pushbacks.
The first of these is the question of the political and administrative relationship between the seven districts. For example, while each district will have unique needs economically, socially and infrastructurally, how will their interactions be defined? In the case of disputes between districts, how will such cases be adjudicated? How will the funds be distributed? And to facilitate such critical logistics, will there be a locally elected overarching body, the equivalent of an assembly in states? How will that function? Such questions and more will have to be answered before implementation.
In praxis, however, any devolution of genuine political power to the district level is welcome. It has the potential for grassroots decision-making, genuine local representation, rapid policy implementation and immediacy in accountability. But this tool of democracy, like several others in its armoury, is a double-edged sword. It can be used either to foster grassroots democracy or centralise power, particularly if the all-important funds are disbursed from the Centre. In Ladakh’s experience, Centrally disbursed funds tend to dilute ground priorities and slacken accountability to local constituents. This is one reason for the scepticism already palpable in Ladakh.
Another reason for Ladakh’s distrust of this latest announcement from New Delhi is that it has the potential to forestall, if not eliminate, plans for renewed protests on the non-delivery of the BJP’s promises over the last 10 years. In other words, is the proposed promulgation a tactical move to buy time as the BJP adjusts itself to a Parliament with a severely reduced majority for the NDA? However, it does not appear Ladakhis are going to be diverted by such tactical measures. In fact, there is already a seeming doubling down.
During a press conference on August 29, Feroz Khan, Kargil’s former Chief Executive Councillor, thanked the government and congratulated the people of the new districts. Significantly, he followed up on his preamble by pointing out that the ‘redistricting’ exercise had ignored Kargil’s proposal to include Shakar-Chigtan and Sankoo-Suru in the exercise. He then elaborated that this was important because the administrative ‘redistricting’ should not devolve into an electoral delimitation exercise. In other words, “He was preempting the possibility that the demarcations could be a plan to ghettoise Muslim or Buddhist populations once ‘shifted’ from their current location in Kargil or Leh districts,” explained Mustafa Haji, senior advocate and political commentator, when I asked him to elaborate on the meaning of Khan’s assertion.
It has been a mere five days since the Home Minister’s tweet. Judging by the focused, swift and analytically sound responses from Ladakh, there is likely to be much more democratic discussion, as well there should be, before the new districts’ proposal is inked.