Ladakh enclave jubilant, but China angered

The Buddhist enclave of Ladakh cheered India’s move to hive it off from Jammu and Kashmir state, a change that could spur tourism and help New Delhi counter China’s influence in the contested western Himalayas.

Beijing, though, criticised the announcement, made on Monday by the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of a wider policy shift that also ended Jammu and Kashmir’s right to set its own laws. In a statement on Tuesday, China said the decision was unacceptable and undermined its territorial sovereignty.

Ladakh is an arid, mountainous area of around 59,146 square kilometers (22,836 square miles), much of it uninhabitable, that only has 274,000 residents. The rest of Jammu and Kashmir is roughly 163,090 square kilometres (62,969 square miles) with a population of some 12.2 million.

China and India still claim vast swathes of each other’s territory along their 3,500 km (2,173 mile) Himalayan border.

“The fact that India took this move ... can be seen as one way that India is trying to counter growing Chinese influence in the region,” said Sameer Patil, a Mumbai-based fellow in international security studies at the Gateway House think-tank.

In a statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China contests the inclusion of what it regards as its territory on the Indian side of the western section of the China-India border.

By announcing it would turn Ladakh into its own administrative district, the Indian government fulfilled a decades-long demand from political leaders there. Ladakh locals were tired of being hurt or ignored because of the many years of turmoil in the Kashmir Valley resulting from separatist militant activity and the Indian military’s moves to crush them.

“We are very happy that we are separated from Kashmir. Now we can be the owners of our own destiny,” Tsering Samphel, a veteran politician from the Congress party in Ladakh, said on Tuesday.