New Delhi, India — On the night of August 5, 2019, hundreds of Kashmiris were arrested amid a crackdown by Indian security forces that followed the Indian government’s decision to strip the region of its special rights and status as a state.
Sonam Wangchuk celebrated, and thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“THANK YOU PRIME MINISTER,” he wrote on X, then Twitter, “for fulfilling Ladakh’s longstanding dream.”
One of India’s best-known innovators and education reformers, Wangchuk was referring to a decades-long demand from many in Ladakh, for the cold desert bordering China to be separated from Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-administered part of the disputed region that Pakistan also claims. Until August 2019, Ladakh was part of Jammu and Kashmir. With the Modi government’s move, it had been made a separate administrative entity, a so-called union territory to be governed federally by New Delhi.
But while the rest of Jammu and Kashmir — also reduced to a union territory from a state — was allowed to keep a locally elected legislature, Ladakh was not. That lack of any say over their future would slowly turn the peaceful Ladakh into a tinderbox of political unrest against Modi’s government in the subsequent six years. And leading that protest movement is a disillusioned Wangchuk.
On September 26, Wangchuk was arrested and transported more than a thousand miles from home to jail in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, charged with “anti-national” activities, conspiring to overthrow the government, after a breakaway group from his protest engaged in violent clashes with security forces. Indian paramilitary soldiers shot dead four protesters, after they had set the local office of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party on fire, and authorities accused Wangchuk of instigating the violence.
The same BJP and Modi government had previously turned to Wangchuk for promotional campaigns in Ladakh. BJP-led governments in other states had sought his advice as an educationist. Today, that one-time poster child, the inspiration for one of Bollywood’s most iconic and successful movies ever, stands accused of treason — with officials imputing a possible Pakistan hand behind his campaign for constitutional rights for Ladakh.
“Suddenly, in a month, the same government that was decorating him is calling him an anti-national,” Gitanjali Angmo, Wangchuk’s wife, told Al Jazeera. “The writing is on the wall: this is to silence him, to scare him because they could not buy him.”
‘Grief in Leh’
Early in September, local activists in Ladakh, led by Wangchuk, began a hunger strike. It was the latest in a series of peaceful protests they had held in recent years demanding constitutional protections under what is known as the Sixth Schedule. That statute allows parts of India that are predominantly inhabited by Indigenous tribes autonomous administrative and governance structures. More than 90 percent of Ladakh’s population consists of such tribes.
But on the 15th day of the strike, some youth-led demonstrators broke away and torched the BJP office in Leh, Ladakh’s capital, on September 24. Security forces fired back: Four people, including a veteran soldier, were killed and dozens were left injured. The administration then launched a massive crackdown, detaining over 80 people, including the protest leaders who had been earlier sitting on a peaceful hunger strike.
Wangchuk was arrested under the National Security Act, a preventive detention law that allows imprisonment without trial for a year. Over a dozen local activists surrendered to the police in solidarity with Wangchuk and other detainees.
It was the worst violence and crackdown in the modern history of Ladakh.
Stanzin Dorje, a local businessman in Leh in his late thirties, had sat next to Wangchuk and others, joining the hunger strike. But amid the crackdown, he was — like the rest of Ladakh — restricted to his home under an unprecedented curfew-like deployment of armed forces on the streets of Leh. Dorje grew increasingly despondent, his friends said.
On Wednesday, Stanzin died by suicide. He is survived by his wife and two children.
“He was Sonam’s fan. He kept asking about him, kept taking his name,” said Tsering Dorje, the president of Ladakh Buddhist Association, a local group central to protests. Stanzin was also a member of the association’s general council. “He felt agitated and very sad. We are all asking, ‘What was [Wangchuk’s] crime? He was just sitting there. Why did they arrest him and send him to a jail outside [Ladakh]?” said Dorje.
Wangchuk’s rise from an engineer next door to an icon of Indian ingenuity and sustainable living made him a local icon, Dorje said, where young people looked up to him. “We are all grieving in Leh for our people, martyred or jailed,” he added.
A national hero
Born in Uleytokpo, a mountain village about 70km from Leh, in 1966, Wangchuk was home-schooled by his mother, Tsering Wangmo, till he was nine. In 1975, when his father, Sonam Wangyal, a politician, became a minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government, the family moved to Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.
But Wangchuk struggled in Srinagar schools because he spoke only Ladakhi, while classes were taught in Urdu and Kashmiri. So he moved to a school in New Delhi for high school, and went on to study mechanical engineering at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar. In 1988, soon after graduating, he co-founded the alternative school model SECMOL, or Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, with other students to reform the education system in Ladakh.
Until then, nearly 95 percent of Ladakhi students failed their state exams amid a struggle with the curriculum which was in Urdu — a language alien to many in Ladakh — and other cultural barriers. Urdu, spoken much more widely in Kashmir, was the dominant language of the state when it was a unified entity.
At SECMOL, the number of students clearing 10th grade rose from 5 percent to 55 percent in seven years, and then to 75 percent. Wangchuk also founded SECMOL Alternative School Campus near Leh, with only one admission criterion: a failing grade in regular schools. At SECMOL, students were taught through hands-on, experiential methods, like running radio stations, farming, repairing machines, and managing the campus themselves.
He was awarded the Jammu and Kashmir’s Governor’s Medal in 1996 for “reforming Ladakh’s education system” through his work.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, Wangchuk’s father, Wangyal, also staged multiple hunger strikes for the recognition of Ladakh’s communities as Indigenous tribes.
In 1984, then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi flew down to Leh and offered Wangyal a soft drink in a symbolic outreach to end one of one those hunger strikes: She committed to recognising the tribal status of Ladakh’s communities.
In the years after Wangchuk established SECMOL in Leh, the son too gained national fame. He became known for innovations such as ice stupas — artificial glaciers to store water in winter — and solar tents for Indian soldiers, stationed in harsh winters of the Himalayas.
Wangchuk also became known as a climate activist, promoting sustainability, said Manshi Asher, a researcher working in the Himalayan region on environmental justice issues for over 25 years.
On his way, Wangchuk collected several awards and titles, including the Magsaysay Award from the Philippines, the Asian version of the Nobel Prize, in 2018.
His approach to education inspired the much-celebrated character Phunsukh Wangdu, played by superstar Aamir Khan in the film 3 Idiots. Khan was portrayed as an unconventional genius who defied rote learning, challenged rigid teachers, and showed that real education lay in curiosity.
The film’s takeaway — that brilliance comes from questioning the system rather than topping it — resonated far beyond India. It became one of Bollywood’s biggest global hits, especially in China, where the story struck a chord with students caught in competitive exams, sparking debates about the purpose of education itself.
Now, Wangchuk is being accused of more than just breaking with the mould. He has been charged with challenging the Indian state itself.
Ladakh police chief SD Singh Jamwal has said that Wangchuk is under investigation after what he described as “credible inputs” suggesting links to Pakistan, claiming that an arrested Pakistani intelligence operative last month had allegedly circulated videos of Wangchuk’s protests.
The police have also cited a trip by Wangchuk to Pakistan to attend an event organised by the Dawn media group in collaboration with the United Nations, in insinuating links with Islamabad, New Delhi’s arch enemy. At the climate conference in Islamabad, Wangchuk had, in fact, praised Modi’s efforts at tackling climate change.
Meanwhile, his arrest has only aggravated the crisis in Ladakh. Local groups leading the protests have withdrawn from the talks with the Modi government, demanding an unconditional release of detainees, including Wangchuk, and compensation for those killed in the firing by security forces.
“We will do an agitation [if the government does not meet our demands], because how could we not?” asked Dorje, of the Ladakh Buddhist Association. “Our people are dead. Our people and leaders are in jail now. What other option do we have now?”
‘Out of pan, into the fire’
Despite his focus on educational reforms and conservation, Wangchuk had increasingly started to take political positions in recent years.
When Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in 2020, Wangchuk urged people to boycott Chinese products. In 2023, he announced a climate fast at Khardung La, one of the highest motorable passes in the world, to underline the climate change impact on the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas. He was put under house detention.
Then, next year, he announced a fast until death for the demand of constitutional safeguards for Ladakh — taking on New Delhi directly, calling out the industrial mining lobby. He also led the “Pashmina March” that year, where locals walked with their herds to highlight threats to pastoral livelihoods.
A week before his arrest in September, Wangchuk recalled his elation in August 2019, when the Modi government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. But later, he said in a video statement, he realised that “we were out of the fire pan, into the fire.”
Ladakh, he said, had been left “with no forum of democracy.”
The intersection of climate activism with day-to-day politics too was inevitable, said Asher.
“In a centralised and top-down decision-making of the capitalist and extractive economic model, where corporate interests are prioritised and the state has the eminent domain, people and ecologies from where resources are extracted lose out,” Asher told Al Jazeera. “Here, the concern of sustainability converges with the demand for democratic and decentralised governance and protective policies.”
So, Asher added, the demands for greater autonomy were intricately linked to the climate threats that the region and its people face.
“In a society, a person can look away from politics — but politics would never leave that person,” said Sajad Kargili, a core member of Kargil Democratic Alliance, another group currently leading the talks with the government in Ladakh. “Sooner or later, the politics had to catch up with Sonam Wangchuk; he cannot escape that because of his innovator past. Politics caught up to him, naturally.”
Kargili said that he does not agree with Wangchuk on his politics. “But while I’m his critic, today, we are also his biggest supporters because we share a genuine struggle for our rights,” Kargili told Al Jazeera.
By framing Ladakhi leaders as ‘anti-nationals’, the Modi government was playing with fire, Kargili said. “Ladakh is a sensitive, border region, near China and Pakistan, and it is extremely important to keep people on board,” he said. “With this iron-fist approach, the government is alienating the people of Ladakh — and there is growing mistrust among the people now.”
Other Ladakh leaders, Kargili said, were preparing for the possibility that they too could be arrested at any time.
‘Ticking time bomb’
Angmo, Wangchuk’s wife and co-founder of Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), said that her husband’s arrest came after a months-long “witch hunt” by authorities against her husband’s movement — threats to donors, intimidating visits by investigating agencies, and the cancellation of licenses needed to receive foreign donations.
Still, Angmo said the movement would survive.
Angmo is now juggling enquiries from security agencies, court cases and trying to keep SEMCOL and HIAL afloat. Two of their staffers are also under detention with other leaders.
In a press statement on Tuesday, September 30, the Ladakh administration said that Wangchuk “had suggested ‘overthrow’ of government on lines of ‘Arab Spring’, if their demands were not met … On multiple occasions, he suggested self-immolation by Ladakhis on lines of protests in Tibet.”
Blaming him for the violence in Leh that left four dead, the Ladakh administration said that “even though other Leh Apex Body leaders (including elders) rushed to pacify the aggressive crowd, Mr. Wangchuk made no attempts to ensure peace.” The apex body is a coalition of political, religious, and community groups in Leh that came together to demand constitutional safeguards for the border region.
“There is no question of witch-hunting or smoke screen. Actions taken by the law enforcement agencies are based on credible inputs and documents. The agencies should be allowed to continue with their investigation impartially without vitiating the process,” the Ladakh administration said in its statement.
To Angmo, the government’s attack on her husband and other protesters threatens to turn Ladakh into a “ticking time-bomb”, like Indian-administered Kashmir, where decades of crackdowns and alleged human rights abuses have left the region perpetually on edge.
“Why are they bent upon making Ladakh into Kashmir?” she asked.
But, most of all, she said, she was worried for her husband. India’s Supreme Court on Monday asked the Modi government to consider sharing the detailed grounds for Wanchuk’s arrest with Angmo, as it set an October 14 date for a hearing on a petition she has filed against her husband’s prosecution.
“I don’t know his condition, or what they are feeding him, or if he has [access to] his medicines,” she said. “Fear is being drilled down on us to stop us from saying the truth: this is not a democracy anymore.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/10/7/how-ladakh-protest-leader-sonam-wangchuk-went-from-indian-hero-to-traitor?traffic_source=rss
