A Frozen Conflict

A book to explain the Siachen conflict was long overdue, and who better to write it than General Raghavan, one of the country’s most articulate defence analysts; a man who has served both on the glacier and on the numerous delegations that have tried to resolve the matter with their Pakistani counterparts.

At first, the book requires just a touch of patience as we are led through the history of the region and encounter plenty of unfamiliar names. But a few pages later Raghavan gets going, and from there on we canter along at an extremely satisfactory pace. He has a welcome knack of explaining even the most complex issues in a handful of simple words, and hence even someone completely unfamiliar with Siachen should be able to follow the arguments he makes.

For starters, he points out that there were good reasons why India had to suddenly post troops on the Saltoro ridge in 1984. The Line of Control had originally only been drawn till point NJ 9842 ‘‘and thence north to the glaciers.’’ Pakistan took that now infamous phrase to mean that the LOC should run northeast till the Karakoram pass, while India argued that the LOC should run north, along the natural watershed on the Saltoro range.

When India began to hear about Pakistani sponsored mountaineering expeditions near Siachen, and the purchase of high altitude equipment by the Pakistani army, it decided to prevent a fait accompli by stationing a few troops on the prominent passes on Saltoro. That nominal presence soon became a full fledged defence of the entire Saltoro range, and the rest is history.

Just one of the interesting points that Raghavan makes in this book is that the ‘‘Siachen War’’ is a misnomer. The actual conflict is taking place over the Saltoro range — no Pakistani soldiers have ever got close to the Siachen Glacier, which lies to the east of Saltoro.

Raghavan is also able to give us an inside account of the seven rounds of negotiations between India and Pakistan on the ending of the conflict. He argues (naturally!) that most of the talks failed because of Pakistani obstinacy — their demands that India withdraw from the Saltoro ridge together with their refusal to mark the present positions. From a military point of view, India has controlled the high ground in this region since 1984. It would be unlikely to withdraw its soldiers without that fact being recognised on paper. And, of course, since 1989 the entire tussle over Siachen has been linked to militancy in Kashmir, and to problems elsewhere on the Line of Control. As with so much else in Jammu and Kashmir, there are no simple solutions to Siachen, and Raghavan doesn’t claim to have the answers. The only suggestion he makes is for some sort of a ceasefire that will help bring down temperatures for a couple of years, after which a partial withdrawal could take place. One suspects that this entire process could end up being held hostage to the usual Indo-Pak tensions and dynamics.

Major problems with this book? Only one, really. Anyone who has been to the forward posts on the Saltoro range can testify to the wealth of human stories that can be told on how the soldiers live and fight in conditions that defy belief. The blizzards that whistle down from nowhere, the snow that has to be melted in saucepans for drinking water, the 90 days without a wash, the helicopter journeys at altitudes of 21,000 feet to touch down on handkerchief sized clearings, the treks up knife-edge glaciated ridges, the cold that reaches in through the layers of clothing to inject your veins with ice.

There is one of this in Siachen: Conflict Without End. Perhaps that was deliberate, to distinguish this scholarly work from the scribblings of the media. But one still feels that all those stories would have added tremendously to the mass appeal of the book.

That apart, this is a book you shouldn’t miss — if you really want to understand the Siachen conflict.

Vikram Chandra is the author of The Srinagar Conspiracy