Siachen Glacier

Keeping troops at Siachen India’s strategic compulsion

Ravi Krishnan Khajuria
Tribune News Service
Jammu, June 5

It is the Karakoram highway between Gilgit-Baltistan and China that compels India to keep her forces at Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield of the world in sub-zero temperature, where it has to spend nearly one million dollars a day to maintain its forces.
While New Delhi and Islamabad have failed to agree on the modalities for the demilitarisation of Siachen at the 12th Defence Secretary-level talks, it is Karakoram Pass, which has forced India to station its troops at Siachen, said defence sources.
“Some parts of Karakoram Pass, which connects Gilgit-Baltistan with China, is under our dominance. To put it more precisely, since we are sitting at a considerable height, some portions of it (Karakoram highway) is well within our range, and if we withdraw from the present position in Siachen, the entire advantage will be squandered away to Pakistan and China,” the sources said.
What China and Pakistan can do to us in the long run could be anybody’s guess, they said, adding that Pakistan would waste no time in capturing the strategic heights.
“Though India insists upon the actual ground position line (AGPL) and wants Pakistan to authenticate it on a map along which the troops are at present deployed, the latter wants us to withdraw to the positions that existed in 1984,” said the sources.
The AGPL is not clearly marked beyond NJ-9842, just short of Siachen Glacier, thereby triggering the dispute between the two nuclear countries. “Siachen has always remained strategically important for us and the growing proximity between China and Pakistan, via Karakoram Pass, has altogether made Siachen indispensable for us,” a source in the Defence Ministry told The Tribune.
While both countries at the end of the 12th Defence Secretary-level talks agreed to carry on the ongoing process, the matter of the fact is that we could not afford to lose the advantage, said the source.
In the last talks both countries had exchanged “non-papers” unofficially presenting their respective views to each other and this time around Pakistan, while describing Beijing as a party to the issue, wanted to involve China in the resolution of the Siachen issue, but India rejected it.
“With Pakistan in all sorts of problems because of home-grown terrorism, we have to be very careful before agreeing on something vis-à-vis Siachen. Chinese troops have already been sighted across the Line of Control, while Chinese companies, in tandem with Pakistan, are exploiting the vast natural resources of scarcely populated Gilgit-Baltistan. And going by the past experiences in Siachen, India must approach the matter very cautiously,” said the source.