A
Motorbike Trip To Little Tibet- Part 1
By Ingmar Lee
09 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Krista, Desmond (age 8) and I
have just returned from a motorbike trip up, up and up from the plains
of India to the back of beyond, right up to the Roof of the World. "Little
Tibet," aka Ladakh, is a wonderous desert moonscape of a land,
set amidst the Earth's most spectacular mountain ranges, where an ancient
culture strives to preserve its timeless way of life. In Ladakh one
can witness a rare still living example of successful human civilization,
-where for centuries, or perhaps millenia, humans have found a balance
amidst the ecological processes, and continue, for the most part to
live well and gently, within the means of their often harsh environment.
In the desolate desert moonscape
of Ladakh, people are the source of greenness, of colour, of vibrancy
and vitality. Nevertheless, Ladakhis are being overwhelmed by myriad
interferences and invasions which are steadily eroding their beautiful
culture, their peaceful wisdom, and their sense of place in the balance
of nature. Ladakh offers so many lessons to the world, and we certainly
have more to learn from them than they do from us before it's too late.
Tragically, as is the case for so many ancient human cultures, Ladakhis
are the victims of rampant expansionist colonialism and to this day,
their land is at the centre of a continuous geopolitical struggle known
as "The Great Game," which has plagued them for 150 years.
The imperialist Great Game
continues to be played out blatantly by neo-colonialists across all
its beleagured historic terrain, throughout the rugged Hindu Kush, Karakoram
and Himalayan ranges of the Indian subcontinent. The 480 km "Himalayan
Highway" which runs between Manali in the foothills, to Leh, Ladakh
in the upper Indus Valley, crosses 4 massive ranges of the Great Himalaya.
For four months of the year, before snowfall blocks the passes, the
road vectors a steady stream of goods and tourists to Ladakh, but for
the most part, it delivers the men and materials of war. We began our
journey on our trusty old Royal Enfield Bullet just as the road opened
this year, even as the bulldozers were still clearing snow at the top
of the passes. The road switchbacks up over passes ranging from 13,000
to more than 18,000 ft, passing into the oxygen-depleted desert realms
of black-blue skies, where stars can be seen in the middle of the day.
The road itself is a single-laned,
intermittently paved roller-coaster ride of high-altitude passes, wash-outs,
creek-crossings, landslides, glacial melts and broken bridges. It was
constructed by the Indian Army to provide an alternative route which
avoids the contested Kashmir and Kargil stretches of the main Srinagar-Leh
access to Ladakh. It passes through the ancient kingdoms of Lahaul and
Spiti, and from there up onto the remote Rupshu plateau before descending
into the Indus Valley east of Leh. The people of Ladakh were a foot-travelling
culture, and every pass has well-worn foot trails, engineered over time
by an unorganized consensus of general use, whereby, according to an
average stamina of the travellers, the most suitable path is mutually
established and worn down over time. A busy trade flourished in these
areas for centuries, which has now been all but wiped out due to the
assinine geopolitical squabbles, begun by the British and the Russians
and now carried on by India, Pakistan and China. This area was historically
self-sufficient, and all the busy trading back and forth by horse, camel,
goat and yak carvans once provided a thriving traditional non-monetary
economy and a friendly cultural interaction and diversity which is currently
sorely lacking.
Although Indian maps might
say so, Ladakh is not India, in the same way that Tibet is not China.
If the ever-homogenizing cultural diversity of India must be ensnared
by an international boundary, then, in my opinion, India ends at the
Rohtang Pass, 50 kms north of Manali. The notion that Ladakh, or other
areas of the embattled so-called "Jammu and Kashmir" region
somehow "belongs" to India is a hangover from the dreadful
legacy of the Great Game, and is nothing but jingoistic hubris perpetuated
by raving Indian nationalist/imperialists who just can't let go of the
habits of their awful colonial past. Neither India, Pakistan or China
are doing anything in their respective occupation zones beyond brazen
warmongering, subjugating the unique and distinct local culture, desecrating
the environment and pandering to those dreadful colonialist-imposed
perimeters that were arbitrarily drawn across the arc of the Himalaya
by their once British masters.
As we wound up the 13,000
ft. Rohtang Pass, where the road passes over the Pir Panjal range which
demarks the southernmost ramparts of the Himalaya, we were passed by
a steady stream of India's holidaying Nouveau Riche. The 'worlds largest
middle class' was racing crazily up the hairpin switchbacks in their
brand new, faux-4X4 SUV's, with the seats still wrapped in plastic.
In India, plastic wrappers are left to cover prized material possessions
for as long as possible to preserve their newness. These tourists careered
wildly in and out of the tanker-truck convoys which were lumbering up
the pass, even passing on the countless blind hairpin corners. The tankers,
all loaded with diesel, were on their way to the icy wastes of the Siachen
Glacier to fuel their ongoing war with Pakistan. Every week of the hot-season
holidays, at least one of these inexperienced mountain maniacs misjudges
a corner and plunges his tightly packed family, -babies, children, mothers,
uncles, aunts and grandparents to their deaths over the precipices that
line the road.
The size of the traffic jam
at the top of the Rohtang was unbelievable. Indian tourists cannot enjoy
their holiday without a maximum of cacophony, chaos and confusion. There
were thousands of honking vehicles in a massive gridlocked traffic jam,
cars were parked haphazardly all over the extensively rutted alpine
tundra and the most easily accessible patches of snow were crammed with
cavorting, squealing tourists. Women in sarees, and with rented gum-boots
and purple faux-fur coats were tobagganing along on inner tubes, people
screamed around on snowmobiles, and fat tourists, blathering on cell
phones, were being led around on herds of ponies while paragliders-for-hire
circled overhead. There were makeshift tea stalls and concession stands
all around and no latrines whatsoever. The whole pass was strewn with
masses of foetid garbage, all fluttering in the wind, obliterating the
Buddhist prayer flags which are a ubiquitous feature of Himalayan passes.
Here at Rohtang Top, the dwindling snow patches the tourists had come
to see were all stained brown from the huge dust storms which blow up
from the plains of India, much of which is caused by the massive deforestation
of the Himalayan ranges.
Once through the crowd, the
road winds down into the Chandra Valley of the Lahaul and Spiti region
and one leaves India behind. We were now alone with the fuel trucks
and the Indian army convoys. The convoys travel slowly in packs, so
for the rest of our journey we often travelled alone for hours without
seeing any other traffic. As one descends, one enters another world.
The Pir Panjal range blocks most of the monsoon which lashes its southern
flanks and the climate on the north side is notably drier. As we descended
to the bottom of the valley, we could see the iridescent green of a
village, where the water is aqueducted out of a mountain freshet to
irrigate fields dug out of the conical alluvial fan of silt. The rocky
land surrounding Lahauli villages is virtually devoid of vegetation
with not a tree in sight. There are some forested areas on the northern
aspect of the Pir Panjal where the rain occasionally crosses the range,
and a few naturally green seepages, but as one moves up the valley,
any of the trees which are seen have been planted in the villages along
the aquaducts.
Following along the Chandra
river, the road winds down the valley toward the main village of Kyelong
where we spent two nights acclimatizing ourselves in preparation to
climb the giddy heights of the passes ahead. Travelling across Lahaul
one passes through the transition zone where Hinduism gives way to Tibetan
Buddhism, and the mandirs give way to the yellow-roofed Buddhist gompas
perched high up on the mountainsides above each village. The villages
are neat and tidy, with large stone houses surrounded by a meticulous
hand-hoed patchwork of fields. The walls of the houses are all slightly
canted inwards for stability in the distictive Tibetan style and have
flat roofs fringed with stacks of firewood gathered from local willow-coppice
orchards. The willows provide an annual sustained yield crop of firewood
to last through the long winters when the Rohtang blows in with snow,
and Lahaul and Spiti are left alone in the world. Travelling onwards
through Jispa towards the Baralacha La, we passed through a sacred aromatic
Juniper forest, which was the last wild forest we were to see on the
trip. Juniper can grow as high as 12,000 feet in these very dry mountains,
and its greenery is burned for its fragrance in every Gompa in the Himalaya.
In October 1947, after the
expulsion of the British from India, Tibet formally requested that India
return Ladakh, as well as Assam and Sikkim to their territory, but they
were rebuffed by India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. India's
dubious claim for Ladakh was based on solely on an arbitrary alignment
first laid down by British commissioners in 1846. The Brits feared that
increasing Russian activities north of the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu
Kush mountains would eventually result in an attack on "British"
India but they could not agree with the Tibetans on a mutual boundary.
Through the mid 1800's, as the British and the Russians schemed and
plotted, spied on and fought each other amongst the vast mountain ranges
of the sub-continent clandestine agents and their expeditions from both
sides crawled all through the Himalayan ranges, seeking military strategy
and vulnerability. Putting lines down on maps establishes an entitlement
of possession, and trangressions of such simplify the grounds for war.
In 1865, W.H. Johnson, a junior civilian sub-assistant with the Survey
of India, proposed an alignment of a Ladakh-Tibet/Sinkiang border which
would link Demchok with the 18,000 feet high Karakoram pass in the north,
and which included the barren and cold Aksai Chin plateau. Although
there had never been any discussion, let alone treaties between the
British and the Tibetans which agreed on this alignment, this eventually
became the basis for India's claim to Aksai Chin.
The Chinese invasion, occupation
and massacre of Tibet commenced in 1950 and the country was soon completely
under their vicious, genocidal control and within several years, the
Chinese Army was already firmly ensconced in the far western reaches
of Tibet. In spite of the brutal occupation, India only became interested
in their Ladakh boundary with China in the mid 1950's, when China casually
informed New Delhi that they had constructed a 112 mile road (unbeknownst
to India) across Aksai Chin. They had thereby annexed the 24,000 sq.
mile plateau which had previously been encircled as part of "British
India." China has always been consistent that its boundary claims
for the region included Aksai Chin, irregardless of the outrageous injustice
of their invasion of Tibet. Contrary to the continuing paranoic Indian
hysteria, China has never had acquisition designs beyond the current
de facto border. Even after destroying India's pathetic military challenge
for the area in 1962, the Chinese army never advanced beyond their border
claim, which they could have easily done. It's inconceivable that China
could have the slightest interest in mounting an invasion of the Ladakh
region, let alone the rest of India. Chinese logic is that their land
claim to the east of the border lies on the Tibetan side of the Himalayan
watershed, and that as China had already built the road without New
Delhi even realising it, therefore India had no interest in the region.
It just so happens that Aksai Chin provides the only practical route
to connect Tibet to Sinjiang.
For years, knowing full well
their military superiority and strategic advantage over India in the
region, Chou En Lai patiently attempted to negotiate a boundary with
India's first post-independence Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, but
to no avail. As Neville Maxwell writes in his in-depth study of the
subject, India's China War :
"Although Nehru assured Parliament that [their]position [in Aksai
Chin] was "more advantageous to India," the Indians were outnumbered
by the Chinese by more than five to one. The strength disparity was
beyond the numbers. The Chinese were concentrated where the Indians
were scattered; the Chinese were able to move in trucks where the Indians
trekked on foot; and the Chinese had all regular supports arms for the
troops while the Indian Brigade had nothing beyond one platoon of medium
machine-guns. The Chinese ranged heavy mortars and recoilless guns on
the Indian posts, and infantry was equipped with automatic rifles.
The Indians had nothing heavier
than three-inch mortars and most posts even lacked those, their troops
equipped with rifles last seen in action before the First World War."
Nehru had sent a hopelessly equipped contingent of basically flip-flop
and running-shoe-clad soldiers to the pester the entrenched Chinese
army, rushing the poor soldiers from the sweltering plains of India
to the desolate 16,000 ft. plain. Many of the 'jawans' promptly dropped
dead from freezing, exposure and altitude-related ailments. It was an
unmitigated disaster. Maxwell writes "Indians will be shocked to
discover that, when China crushed India in 1962, the fault lay at India,
or more specifically, at Jawaharlal Nehru and his clique's doorsteps.
It was a hopelessly ill-prepared Indian army that provoked China on
orders emanating from Delhi, and paid the price for its misadventure
in men, money and national humiliation." Having retreated back
behind the original border alignment demanded by China to lick their
wounds, that which survived began the Indian army occupation of Ladakh.
After a long winding climb
through glacial morraines to the top of the 16,000 ft. Baralacha La,
we descended to the virtually uninhabited and treeless Sarchu Valley.
Several "parachute camps" are set up on the wide plain at
the base of the valley which cater to the truck traffic and to bus passengers
travelling between Manali and Leh who overnight there. At 14,000 ft.,
in this windswept and lonely place, we checked in at a police outpost
and stopped for the night. There are no latrines provided for the thousands
of people who pass through for four months every year, nor is there
any provision for the tonnes of garbage this traffic produces. That
all meets the same fate as the tangled wreckage of a fuel-truck which
ran off the road and crashed into the crystalline glacial water of the
river far below. Aside from the road travellers, except for a single
village, nomadic yak, sheep and goat-herders and their flocks are the
only visible living presence out on the plain. The valley was once a
major thoroughfare for itinerant traders and pack-animal trains, trading
between Tibet, Ladakh and India, but this has all but ended since the
construction of the road. The ancient trails can still be seen, but
having fallen into disuse, they are gradually disintegrating.
After passing through the
Sarchu plains, we began climbing up the "Gata Loop" switchbacks
to cross the 16,600 ft Lachlung La. This beautiful double pass has been
marred by the thousands of empty tar barrels which were simply rolled
down the mountainsides into the valley during the paving of the road.
Along the opposite side of the valley, we marvelled at the line taken
by the ancient trail route, which ascended on a continuous gradual angle
across cliff faces and ridge lines all the way to the top. Sure, modern
engineers had designed a road that could get a Tata fuel truck over
the pass which consumed the entire valley side in succeeding terraces
of switchbacks, while the ancient trail could safely accomodate the
annual traffic of countless pack animals on a single continuous incline.
All along the road we passed broken down trucks which had wheezed to
a halt on the roadside, while their frozen and oxygen-starved drivers
and shotgun riders struggled to get them going again. Amazingly, many
of the hundreds of fuel trucks on "Army Contract" were attempting
the road with completely bald tires, including their spares. Once over
the pass, the degree of desert increases even more, and the landscape
around Pang at 15,000 ft. is vast and starkly beautiful, in its desolate,
haunting emptiness. We passed a sleepless night in another roadside
parachute tent, run by Sonam, an impressive Ladakhi woman with irrepressible
energy and cheer who plied us with soldja and tsampa (butter tea and
roasted barley flour). We were now finally in Ladakh.
In 1947, immediately after
ousting the British and the subsequent subdivision of the subcontinent,
India and Pakistan were at each others throats, and after two years
of fighting, the UN brokered the "Karachi Agreement," with
a Cease-Fire Line (CFL) which divided the Kashmir valley, 2/5 to Pakistan,
3/5 to India. The agreement delineated a border which commenced at Manawar
in the south, and dividing Kashmir, continued on through Baltistan to
a point on the map known as NJ 9842, nearly 20 km north of the Shyok
river in the Chulung group of mountains of the Saltoro range. Beyond
there, the detailed description of the CFL line simply petered out,
stating vaguely that it ran "thence north to the glaciers."
Neither side complained about the ambiguity, -the area was an empty,
frigid wasteland above 20,000 ft., and therefore of no interest to any
rational human being. In the 1971 India/Pakistan war, the CFL got all
changed around.
There had been advances and
retreats by both the sides in this second war, and after another UN
intervention, the new positions were accepted by the combatants. Since
then, this new line has been referred to as the Line of Control (LoC),
and remains the de facto border between Pakistan and India today. In
spite of this, it is illegal to distribute any map in India which does
not define the "official border of India as including the Baltistan,
Gilgit, Hunza, Deosai and Ishkoman and several other regions of the
area which is controlled by Pakistan. And once again, the final point
delimited and demarcated for the LoC was NJ 9842, which is about 78
kilometers short of the Siachen glacier.
India says the border should
run due north from this point, while Pakistan argues that it should
run straight NE to the Karakoram Pass. To this day, India and Pakistan
have been duking it out for this remotest triangle of area.
It was only after Pakistan
began issuing permits in the 1970's to mountaineering and scientific
groups who wanted to climb and conduct research in the Saltoro Range
of the Karakoram, that India suddenly got interested in this other chunk
of Ladakh, which lies to the west of the Karakoram Pass at the northwest
point of Aksai Chin.
To their consternation,
India found that Pakistan, as well as other countries had been publishing
maps positioning the Siachen Glacier, the largest in the Himalaya and
known as 'the third pole,' within Pakistan boundaries. To counter this
"cartographic aggression," the Indian Army launched its first
"Great Game" expedition to the Siachen glacier on September
20, 1978, to establish a "claim." Since then, India and Pakistan
have been stalemated in this most ridiculous, bloody, 3-decade battle,
basically slaughtering each other over a patch of ice. At more than
20,000 ft., the altitude and weather kills off more of the soldiers
than does the combat itself. While the Pakistani's have road access
to the Siachen battlefield, the Indian army has to helicopter all its
supplies.
Today the Indian Army is
garrisoned all over Ladakh and its "jawans" are a highly visible
presence everywhere. They are immediately recognizable from afar by
their deep green jungle camouflage, which stands out so starkly against
the bleak desert moonscape of Ladakh, that they may as well be adorned
with flourescent bulls-eyes.