Explainer | Next Ladakh? In India-China stand-off, a new front looms in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan
- With the prospect of a brutal winter war between China and India hanging over the Himalayas, attention turns to an isolated region of disputed Kashmir
- Gilgit-Baltistan, which faces being sucked into a two-front war, has long been fiercely loyal to Pakistan. Yet many feel this loyalty has not been reciprocated
Instead of celebrations, almost all the members of the general population interviewed by This Week in Asia during a three-week tour of Gilgit, Nagar, Hunza and Astore districts last month were sceptical that Islamabad would deliver on its promises.
A few smiled indulgently when asked about it, responding with a polite “Inshallah” (God willing). Most were non-committal and responded with the secular equivalent, “we’ll see”. Others just scoffed at the idea that the constitutional status of Gilgit-Baltistan could be changed even to that of a “provisional” province, because of the implications for Pakistan’s long-running dispute with India over Kashmir. Both countries claim all of Kashmir and have fought two wars over it.
On Sunday, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said a decision had been made to move ahead with the plan, though he gave no time frame for implementation.
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“When it starts, all manner of proxy warfare will break out in Gilgit-Baltistan,” he predicted, in an interview at a riverside restaurant in Gilgit.
None of those billions of CPEC dollars have been invested in Gilgit-Baltistan, despite its pivotal role as a gateway, and none of the officials and politicians This Week in Asia spoke to could provide a plausible explanation for this glaring omission.
In the absence of any official clarification, most laypeople, officials and politicians are convinced the absence of CPEC projects reflects an emergent game of thrones between global and regional powers that manifested recently in Ladakh.
“This is the second time Gilgit-Baltistan has been in the eye of a geopolitical storm,” Naji said. “The last time was when the Russian Empire and the British Raj clashed here in the 19th century. The borders of Gilgit-Baltistan shifted during the original Great Game, and it’s inevitable they’ll change again as a result of the new Great Game” he predicted.
Any foreign force intruding into Gilgit-Baltistan would walk into very hostile territory: for decades, the isolated, almost impassable high altitude valleys of the region have been a prime recruiting ground for Pakistan’s army.
Most residents of the region are poor subsistence farmers. When Gilgit-Baltistan’s long, harsh winter abates in May, they have six months to bring in a single harvest. Once the snow and ice return in October, these farmers travel to Pakistani cities to work as minimum-wage migrant labourers until spring arrives in May.
Their counterparts from Gilgit-Baltistan’s erstwhile aristocracy and other wealthy families have also traditionally pursued careers as army officers, helping to cement their place within Pakistan’s ruling elite.
Unsurprisingly, the residents of Gilgit-Baltistan – which plays host to 21 of the world’s 30 highest peaks – have proven to be crack mountain soldiers.
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Practically every household in Gilgit-Baltistan includes at least one active soldier or reservist who has fought Indian forces on the Line of Control separating the Indian- and Pakistani-administered halves of greater Kashmir.
The Gilgit-Baltistan-based Northern Light Infantry (NLI) regiment shot to stardom in 1999 by seizing the strategic Indian-held Kargil Heights overlooking the main Indian supply route to the Siachen Glacier – an operation mirrored by China’s recent incursion into Indian-held territory in Ladakh.
Dozens of Gilgit-Baltistan soldiers were slaughtered as they subsequently attempted to withdraw without the protection of covering fire from Pakistani forces.
Nonetheless, the Kargil War made national heroes of the fallen soldiers from Gilgit-Baltistan and awoke within Pakistan’s military-led establishment a realisation that the disputed region’s unflinching loyalty had to be reciprocated.
The point was further underscored by the decisive role that Gilgit-Baltistan soldiers played in the 2009 liberation of the Pakistani region of Swat – home of Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai – from the clutches of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.
Pakistan’s national flag now flies over the graves of Gilgit-Baltistan’s fallen soldiers at practically every burial site in the region.
The package of reforms unveiled by Pakistan in 2009, however, did little to empower the people of Gilgit-Baltistan or to repay their sacrifices.
The newly created, elected regional assembly was given very limited legislative scope. It is not allowed to raise revenues independently of Islamabad and remains completely dependent on federal grants.
The Gilgit-Baltistan government’s budget for the current financial year ending next June totals about US$415 million.
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Although the region has tax-free status because of its disputed status, Pakistan’s government collects more than US$200 million a year in customs duties on overland trade with China, rather than allowing the Gilgit-Baltistan government to accrue the revenue.
Nor is the Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly empowered to hold the executive branch of the region’s government accountable for its actions.
All those powers rest with the Islamabad-appointed Gilgit-Baltistan Council, which is chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister. Among the council’s members, Pakistani officials outnumber Gilgit-Baltistan representatives.
Parallel to these convoluted reforms, Gilgit-Baltistan’s civil service has been inundated by federal officials deputed to the region since 2009.
All of them take up officer-rank posts that would otherwise have been filled by one of Gilgit-Baltistan’s disproportionately high number of unemployed university graduates.
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Federal deputationists all benefit from generous allowances to compensate for their “hardship posting”. The pay packet of top bureaucrats can exceed US$24,000 a year, placing them in the top 10 per cent of earners in Pakistan, where per capita income was less than US$1,400 in 2019.
They each return to Pakistan after a three-year posting with a second pension fund worth several hundred thousand US dollars – all paid for from the federal government’s small annual budgetary grant to Gilgit-Baltistan.
Likewise, the higher judiciary in Gilgit-Baltistan created under the 2009 reforms is in no way accountable to the region’s elected representatives.
Here, too, federal judges outnumber their local colleagues, and they have also showed a proclivity for hiring staff from Pakistan rather from Gilgit-Baltistan.
With governance and justice still firmly in federal hands, Gilgit-Baltistan residents simply do not believe Pakistan’s establishment would suddenly surrender power over their region – even if it is officially granted the status of a provisional province.
Instead, most residents expect that the transformational change to Gilgit-Baltistan recently promised by Islamabad will ultimately prove to be largely cosmetic.
Most feel that the best outcome for them would be access to Pakistan’s judicial system inasmuch as it would enable them to petition the Supreme Court against the rampant abuse of power prevalent throughout the Gilgit-Baltistan state apparatus
Residents have good reason to be sceptical. Rather than benefiting the indigenous population through better governance, the 2009 reforms strengthened the Pakistani establishment’s system of patronage in Gilgit-Baltistan, making it more susceptible to corruption.
Since 2018, this has been evident in the real estate markets of isolated, sparsely populated Gilgit-Baltistan, home to just 1.5 million of Pakistan’s 210 million residents.
There has been an enormous influx of funds from Pakistan seeking refuge from the crackdown on corruption and tax evasion launched by Prime Minister Imran Khan, shortly after his election two years ago.
The hot money latched on to expectations of an economic boom fuelled by CPEC and the Pakistani tourists who have swamped Gilgit-Baltistan since 2016, when Pakistan’s military finally defeated Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan after a nine-year struggle.
The prices of commercial and residential property in Gilgit-Baltistan have quadrupled since 2018, rising to the equivalent of 50 per cent of real estate values in Islamabad. A decade ago, land prices in Gilgit were barely one tenth of those in Pakistan’s capital city.
The subsequent movement of capital between Pakistan and Gilgit-Baltistan has enriched both the political and business elite.
“Whenever I go to get a property transaction approved, I get to see the latest registrations in the land registry. In recent times, it’s been like reading a who’s who of powerful Pakistanis,” said Rasheed Ahmad, a Gilgit-based property agent and the proprietor of local Urdu language newspaper Himalaya Today.
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The property bubble has benefited many small landowners in areas popular with the tourists who flock to the region between June and September.
In turn, this has generated massive investment in hotels, restaurants and retail shops, providing sorely needed business and employment opportunities for Gilgit-Baltistan’s widely literate population.
The flip side of the real estate boom is that it exploits a political loophole under which, in the 1950s, Gilgit-Baltistan residents were deprived of their exclusive right to land ownership in the region.
In stark contrast, land ownership in Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir is still reserved for the indigenous population. In Gilgit-Baltistan, too, there is growing concern that the massive influx of hot money from the Pakistani hinterland could come at the cost of residents’ property rights and the cohesion of tightly knit rural communities.
A prime example of such exploitation is the picturesque Naltar Valley, which houses a ski training facility for the Pakistan Air Force.
Pakistani and local politicians and officials privy to the plans quickly snapped up farm and pastoral land from the area’s poor, oblivious residents at rock bottom prices.
They quickly soared as Naltar Valley subsequently became a focal point of public investment in infrastructure, including a cascade of hydropower projects and a new road connecting it to the Karakorum Highway.
Alerted by the exploitation of their Naltar neighbours, many communities in Hunza and Nagar have since imposed a grass roots ban on the sale of property to outsiders.
Public alarm about property rights in Gilgit-Baltistan grew yet further when the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO), a commercial arm of the military which dominates the region’s construction industry, recently attempted to seize more than 3,000 hectares of ancestral pastoral land on the pretext that it was needed for CPEC projects.
The FWO was forced to retreat after the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) channelled the anger of affected landowners into a political campaign.
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“Irrespective of which institution was involved, it was a land grab, plain and simple,” said Amjad Hussain, the president of the PPP chapter in Gilgit-Baltistan, in an interview in Gilgit.
To date, however, there has been no CPEC activity in Gilgit-Baltistan, despite its pivotal role as the exclusive gateway for trade between China and Pakistan.
Even under the second five-year phase of the programme launched in July, the renewed CPEC investment in hydropower projects has focused on Azad Kashmir to the west.
Belatedly, in response to public complaints about power shortages, a large hydropower plant in Hunza has been recently added to the brief list of planned CPEC projects in Gilgit-Baltistan.
“Nobody here has a problem if billions of dollars of CPEC projects are built in Pakistan, as long as it’s not at the cost of excluding Gilgit-Baltistan, the gateway for the entire enterprise, or the property rights of the people,” Hussain said.
“Otherwise, all that Gilgit-Baltistan will get out of CPEC is traffic pollution,” he said.
The traffic will be slow in coming. While the southernmost stretch of the Karakorum Highway has been transformed into a motorway by Chinese firms working under the CPEC umbrella, most of the section in Gilgit-Baltistan has been in tatters for many years.
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Pakistan’s plans to rebuild the highway in Gilgit-Baltistan have been further pushed back by the construction of the massive Diamer-Bhasha Dam and Dasu hydropower project along the route.
The US$2.7 billion contract to build the dam was awarded in May to a 70:30 joint venture between
China Power – which has arranged financing from Chinese state-owned banks – and the FWO.
Historically, the FWO and its sister military businesses laid the foundations of Gilgit-Baltistan’s economic infrastructure, starting with the Karakorum Highway.
In recent years, however, their virtual monopoly position in the construction and communications sectors has proven to be a serious impediment for domestic and foreign investors – including Chinese firms.
In 2018, the military-run Strategic Communications Organisation (SCO) vetoed the award of a licence to China Mobile to establish 4G internet networks in Gilgit-Baltistan, belatedly citing a redundant regulation which decades ago established it as the state monopoly operator in the disputed territory.
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However, the SCO has yet to fill the technological vacuum created by its intervention. Gilgit-Baltistan residents still do not have access to internet services capable of sustaining video streaming, although China completed the installation of a fibre optic cable to Pakistan via Gilgit-Baltistan two years ago.
Instead of apologising, the SCO accused young social media activists of being “anti-state” in a tweet, which was quickly deleted after it triggered a public outcry.
Likewise, Gilgit-Baltistan’s business community has become increasingly vocal in its criticism of the military’s business monopoly of public works projects in the region. At a press conference in September, representatives of the Gilgit-Baltistan contractors association said that, by hogging even relatively small scale government projects, the FWO and its sister military business concerns were putting the local construction industry out of business.
These episodes typify the increasingly terse relationship between Pakistan’s state institutions and Gilgit-Baltistan society.
Multiple sources in the civil service told This Week In Asia that there had been several instances of shouting matches between ranking local and federal bureaucrats, after the latter made demeaning remarks about Gilgit-Baltistan’s economic dependency on Islamabad.
Similarly, activist lawyers – tacitly supported by influential local personalities – have launched a series of petitions in Gilgit-Baltistan’s higher courts to maintain pressure on the Pakistani state to grant self governance to the region.
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Gilgit-based lawyers involved in the campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that their campaign also aimed to expose the perceived bias of the federally dominated Gilgit-Baltistan judiciary.
Like many other activists who have challenged the writ of the Pakistani state in Gilgit-Baltistan, the campaigning lawyers have been charged with offences under draconian anti-terrorist laws.
Activism against the state’s heavy-handedness peaked in October when the residents of Hunza blockaded the stretch of the Karakorum Highway between Gilgit and the Khunjerab Pass border crossing with China.
Some 500 men, women and children of all ages staged a 24-hour sit-in to demand the release of activist Baba Jan and 13 other activists sentenced to life imprisonment for rioting, after violent clashes in 2011 between police and protesters seeking compensation for the loss of lives and property caused by a massive landslide.
Lawyers associations supported the Hunza activists by boycotting courts in various districts of Gilgit-Baltistan on successive days.
On the seventh day of the protests, the state blinked: after three years of stonewalling an appeal petition seeking the acquittal of the 14 Hunza activists, the caretaker Gilgit-Baltistan government said the case would be heard within a month. Their families were assured that the men would be home by November 30.
Government officials and ranking politicians in the major political parties said public resentment was close to boiling point – particularly among Gilgit-Baltistan’s unemployed, educated youth.
“The people of Gilgit-Baltistan feel that their loyalty has not been reciprocated because Pakistan’s establishment does not trust them,” said Akbar Hussain Akbar, chief spokesman of Khan’s PTI in Gilgit-Baltistan.
“If people’s grievances are not addressed, the public blowback could be disastrous for Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan,” he said.
