Research Dossier:
Mapping the Environmental Impacts of the Siachen Glacier Military Occupation
Hamza Jilani
March 2024
Research Statement
My overarching question is: how do Asian militaries manipulate, change, and interact with the glacial regions of the Himalayas? I will be looking specifically at the Siachen glacier in the Karakoram mountain range of Kashmir, the site of an almost-vertical military confrontation between the Indian and Pakistani armies over the Kashmir territory. The glacier is situated in a region that has been the site of a massive infrastructural project – the Karakoram China-Pakistan Friendship Highway – and is just northeast of where the Line of Control between India and Pakistan ends, making it the site of major geopolitical and economic conflict.
As the site of a material conflict in which bullets and devices of war have been used, significant direct environmental effects have occurred in Siachen, especially in the form of the Indian Army’s dumping of a “one-way flow of military materials, approximately 40 percent of which are plastic and metal.” Extreme climate conditions in the area make it nearly impossible for the dumped empty ammunition shells and parachutes to decompose or be burned. The biodiversity in the area, which includes the ibex and snow leopard, as well as unique flora like the wild rose are threatened by this waste.
The polluted glacier's melting waters are the main source of the Shyok River, which joins the Indus river, making the polluted Siachen glacier a major source of the largest irrigation system in the world. Given the inhospitability of the region, very few civilian settlements populate the areas around the military base camps, for which strategic roads and infrastructural projects such as bridges and communication towers have been built. The tourism-oriented development that has occurred at Siachen in the last few years – including Ladakh’s Tourism Department’s 2023 announcement that Indian tourists could travel to the civil tourist facility near Siachen Base Camp without special permits – has not only had similar effects but has also been tied up in similar logics of conquest and management.
In the existing research, satellite imagery and historical maps have been used to illustrate the cartographic and spatial dimensions of the conflict. The verticality of the area has been explored for the ways it makes cartographic representation ambiguous and difficult, imagines the landscape as “icy wasteland, desolate heights, strategically important or heroic summits,” and shapes climbing and military strategy practices and experiential aspects of living in the region (Baghel and Nüsser). The political significance and environmental extremities of the region also complicate the efficacy and usefulness of glacial remote sensing in the area, as both tend to restrict the ability of such technology to provide accurate topographic data.
In fact, the difficulty of ground surveys and the seeming impossibility of war on such inhospitable terrain caused Pakistani attempts to dispute India’s occupation of Kashmir to result in an extremely unclear and highly disputed U.N. monitored ceasefire line (CFL) based on the presence of troops when the fighting ended in 1948; although the CFL was converted into a line of control (LOC) between Indian and Pakistani-administered territory, cartographers extended the boundary from the specified CFL point in inconsistent directions, some of which depicted Pakistani administration over areas where India held military bases. Tied up in this ‘cartographic aggression,’ as the Indian state sees it, are the emotional resonance of the boundary map of India as Bharat Mata and the affects of heroism and military might associated with Siachen being a laboratory of high-altitude extreme warfare. Today, the Pakistani and Indian militaries take advantage of geospatial technologies, including handheld GPS, ground penetrating radar for mapping crevasses and avalanche hazards, and remote sensing to produce critically three-dimensional digital representations of the battlefield for military planning and logistics in an environment where using long-range missiles and precision-guided munitions is difficult due to the topography (Baghel and Nüsser). Shortly after the August 2019 to February 2021 government-imposed communications blackouts on the civilian population of Jammu and Kashmir that were part of their repressive lockdown and crackdown on the Kashmiri separatist movement, which the Siachen base was likely instrumental in supporting, the Indian army installed a satellite-based internet service on the glacier in 2022 for Army use.
Thus, while military secrecy (along with physical constraints) prevents public access to satellite-based and ground survey-collected information about military infrastructures that might be helpful for understanding military-environment interactions and impacts, the Indian government’s emphasis on national pride has driven the state to publicize infrastructural projects and military operations for the heroism and bravery associated with traversing glacial extremes. Since the glacier is largely inhospitable for a settler-colonial project, the Indian government also encourages tourism at Siachen – establishing tourist and religious sites at the glacier and opening the base up to civilians – in order to bolster their claims to Siachen territory through the incorporation of Siachen into the civilian national imagination of Indian territory. Ultimately, military infrastructures on Siachen are made hypervisible at the same time as they are made opaque by multiple ongoing efforts of territorialization.
My vision for a project that answers my research question would be a TimeMap-like app using a stable Siachen Glacier outline developed from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) as the base map where clicking on each event in a timeline below the map – where the list of events will include publicized military operations and infrastructural projects like bridges and roads as well as civilian and tourism-related projects – allows the user to zoom into an associated location pin on or around the glacier. At this point, the user can view more information about the event as well as a timelapse that shows how the military-associated event has changed or been forced to interact with the environment around the particular site of military operation or infrastructural project. These timelapses will be developed through True Color and Highlight Optimized Natural Color visualizations that use Sentinel-2 L2A data. Moreover, the timeline below the map would include a slider that turns the base satellite imagery layer into an interactive timelapse showing a broader view of glacial change in the region over time. Given the political challenges with glacial remote sensing at Siachen, the representations that this project generates are evidence of the struggle of ‘seeing’ this information, giving this project significance as a historical document of sensing capabilities as functions of political and material realities.
My hope is to build out this digital geography project to include events associated with military operations of China, India, and Pakistan in the region since 1948 in order to develop a timeline that centers the glacier while telling a geospatial story of how Asian militaries manipulate, change, and interact with the glacial regions of the Himalayas. My current project, however, focuses on how these interactions have happened in the context of the Indian military’s operations associated with the abrogation of article 370, which disallowed internal administration in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and came alongside a repressive military occupation.