Mountain of war: The India-Pakistan conflict’s deadliest battle zone

Islamabad, Pakistan – Deep in the Karakoram mountain range, where the borders of India, Pakistan and China converge at heights the human body was not built to endure, lies a glacier the people of Baltistan and Ladakh have long called Siachen: "land of wild roses". A frozen river of more than one trillion cubic feet of pristine ice, stretching over 70km, it has been a battlefield since April 1984. India and Pakistan have fought over it ever since. But it’s unlike any other contested real estate. In the 42 years since 1984, India and Pakistan have waged war against each other in the mountains, exchanging deadly fire across their de facto border in Kashmir, with a furious battle later erupting in 1999 in Kargil, about 100km (62 miles) to the southwest of Siachen. And in May 2025, they traded missiles and drones over four days in the worst military confrontation between the two countries since Kargil, after 26 civilians were killed in an attack in Pahalgam, a resort town in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed armed groups it said were backed by Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denied. Through each of these crises, there was silence on the Saltoro Ridge, the jagged, 110km-long range of peaks west of Siachen where both armies have faced each other since 1984. Not a shot was fired. Yet peace hasn’t returned to the glacier, either. When a ceasefire was announced on May 10, 2025, following their brief war, Indian and Pakistani soldiers remained firmly in place on Siachen. The fight for Siachen is not simply a frozen conflict. It is a conflict that has, over time, acquired its own logic of persistence. A hero is born On February 3, 2016, when 10 Indian soldiers belonging to the 19 Madras Battalion returned to their camp after concluding their patrol past midnight, they did not know it was the last time they would walk into bone-freezing temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius. A few hours later, at the crack of dawn, a massive ice wall, 800m (half a mile) wide and 182 metres (600 feet) high, came crashing down and buried their post. Within a day, rescue teams from the Indian Army’s Northern Command and the Air Force raced up 5,974 metres (19,600 feet) to reach Sonam Post, among the highest positions on the Saltoro Ridge. Using heavy snow-cutters, sniffer dogs and specialised equipment, they recovered five bodies as they dug through rock-like ice, excavating 30 feet in search of the remaining men. On the fifth day, they found 33-year-old Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad, barely alive, inside his shattered fibre-reinforced shelter. The news of a sole survivor spread rapidly, amplified by breathless television anchors. Military men, not known for public displays of emotion, shed tears. A nation of more than a billion was riveted. Feted as the “Miracle of Siachen”, Koppad’s fate was followed minute by minute as he was airlifted to New Delhi for treatment. Medics described his condition as “severely dehydrated, hypothermic, hypoxic, hypoglycaemic and in shock”. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his first tenure, and then-Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag visited him in hospital. Three days later, however, the miracle ended. Koppad died. A wife, a two-year-old daughter and a nation were left to mourn. For most militaries, it is those who fall to bullets or bayonets who become the foundation of pride and myth. Siachen is different. For more than two decades since India and Pakistan signed a ceasefire in November 2003, not a single soldier has died here from a battle wound. Heroes at these heights are made when men freeze to death, fall into bottomless crevasses, or are swept away by avalanches and buried under tonnes of ice. In the first three months of 2016 alone, the Indian army lost 17 men to the elements. India’s official weather-related death toll has crossed 1,100 since 1984, according to the government’s last official acknowledgement in June 2019. The mountain has continued to claim lives since then. Among the many who died was Naib Subedar Baldev Singh, killed on April 20, 2025, at Kumar Post, just two days before the Pahalgam attack that caused the war that followed. And nature does not discriminate between sides. The single biggest loss came on the night of April 6–7, 2012, when 129 soldiers of the Pakistan Army’s 6 Northern Light Infantry and 11 civilian contractors were killed after their base in the Gayari sector, at 3,775 metres (12,385 feet), was buried under a massive avalanche. It swallowed 1.2sq km of terrain under ice as hard as granite and as deep as 60 metres. A Norwegian expert group later estimated it would take 12 years to fully clear the debris. It took rescue teams 49 days to find the first body. The operation ended after 16 months, with 131 bodies recovered. Nine men were never found. Fighting at minus 50 degrees Celsius More than 2,000 people have died in this conflict since 1984. That’s comparable with the total death toll from the Kargil war. But unlike Kargil, where soldiers died in gunfire or in arm-to-arm combat, fewer than 3 percent of those lost on Siachen have died in actual fighting. The rest were claimed by the mountain. Mercury plunges to minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 50 Fahrenheit). Average winter snowfall approaches 10 metres (35 feet). Blizzards can strike at speeds of up to 300km/h (186mph). Storms last for days. Avalanches sweep across heights ranging from 13,000 to 22,000 feet, where soldiers breathe air with less than 30 percent oxygen. Frostbite, snow blindness and a host of other afflictions leave marks that last long after a soldier leaves the glacier. The financial cost mirrors the human toll. To supply, clothe and equip soldiers, India’s last officially disaggregated estimate for Siachen – budgeted in 2015–16 – stood at $499m. Neither government has published a glacier-specific figure since. Observers and former military officials caution that the true cost is now significantly higher, adjusted for inflation and the rising expense of high-altitude logistics. But in the absence of updated data, the full financial burden remains, like much of the battle over the glacier, opaque. Twenty of the 57 items that an Indian soldier wears must be imported. Pakistan’s estimated annual expenditure, last calculated around the same period, ranged between $50m and $60m for roughly 3,000-4,000 troops. Both countries, with large segments of their populations living below the poverty line – and Pakistan’s recent economic crisis, marked by IMF bailouts, only sharpening that impoverishment – continue to justify this war. Fighting for terrain that may no longer exist The environmental cost is less easily tallied but no less real. About 900kg of human waste is dumped into the glacier’s crevasses each day. Heavy artillery containing toxic metals, including lead, contaminates the meltwater. The meltwater from Siachen feeds the Nubra and Shyok rivers, which drain into the upper parts of the Indus river system — another point of tension between the neighbours. The glacier itself has long shown unusual resilience compared with its Himalayan neighbours, a phenomenon glaciologists call the Karakoram Anomaly. But recent peer-reviewed studies suggest even that reprieve may be ending, with the region shifting towards net mass loss since 2018. The armies are fighting over a disappearing asset. In 1905, the Survey of India warned that Siachen was “too difficult of access, and too remote from civilised centres, to be a source of anything but periodical embarrassment”. The late American scholar Stephen Cohen once called it “a struggle of two bald men over a comb”. And still, men like Koppad and Singh continue to lose their lives, with no end to the standoff in sight. The origins of this conflict lie in geography, and in a line on a map that no one thought to extend. The incomplete border Surrounded by snowcapped, sharply rising spires of the unconquered peaks of the Karakoram, a towering mountain range east of the Himalayas, this frozen river of pristine ice is part of a range that Italian explorer Fosco Maraini described in 1961 as “the world’s most spectacular museum of shape and form”. At a height of more than 5.4km (18,000 feet) at its source, this 72km (45-miles) long and 3.8km (2.4 miles) wide glacier appears like a carpet of blindingly white snow, quietly inching forward on a downward slope, twisting and turning, enticing mountaineers to a dangerously seductive terrain full of summits that have never been scaled. When viewed from above, the glacier appears like a snake, slithering and twisting in a northwest to southeast direction, with sub-glaciers and tributaries sprouting outward like the arms of a centipede as it curves into a hook-like shape just where it ends: at the snout where wild roses grow and the Nubra river flows. In 1821, British explorer William Moorcroft became the first person from the West to document the glacier’s existence. In 1909, English doctor Tom George Longstaff became the first Westerner to traverse the glacier’s full length. Over the following decades, the decline of the British Empire in the subcontinent gathered pace, and two world wars, divided by just over 20 years, meant Western explorers made only rare Karakoram expeditions. Then came the partition of August 1947, which carved two new nation-states from undivided India. As both countries sought to bring order after colonial rule ended, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir under Maharaja Hari Singh remained undecided about which country to join. When he acceded to India in October 1947, the Muslim-majority regions of Gilgit and Baltistan revolted, leading to the first India-Pakistan war in 1948. A year later, Pakistan and India sat down with the United Nations’ Truce Subcommittee in July 1949 in Pakistan’s then-capital, Karachi, to agree on a Ceasefire Line (CFL). The Karachi Agreement demarcated the line until map grid-point NJ 9842, near the southern end of the Siachen glacier, close to the Shyok valley. With no human presence beyond this point due to the inhospitable terrain, both sides settled on a vaguely worded document concluding that the line from NJ 9842 should continue “thence north to the glaciers”. Between 60km (37 miles) and 70km (43 miles) of distance was left undemarcated from this point to the Karakoram Pass, the gateway to China. To complicate matters further, Pakistan entered into an agreement with China in 1963, gifting land — that Pakistan controlled but that India claimed — at the border just north of the Siachen glacier, with the international boundary of that agreement marked at Karakoram Pass. India vehemently refused to recognise this land transfer, considering it illegal under its stated policy that the entire territory of Jammu and Kashmir belongs to India. The agreement was a harbinger: it placed the Siachen region at the intersection of India, Pakistan and China’s strategic geography. India and Pakistan again failed to resolve these ambiguities in 1972, when they met in Shimla, formerly known as Simla, in the aftermath of the war that created Bangladesh and ended in a decisive Indian victory. The Simla Agreement replaced the Ceasefire Line with the Line of Control, newly demarcated after the war. The relevant clause stated: “neither side shall seek to alter it [LoC] unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations”. Yet grid point NJ 9842 — the final demarcated point on the LoC — reinforces the vacuum left by the Karachi Agreement. That vagueness would spawn the world’s highest war 12 years later. Cloud messenger — of war Expeditions to the glacier and unexplored regions of the Karakoram picked up in the decades after Pakistan came into being in August 1947. Travelling through Baltistan, on Pakistan’s side of the LoC, was the more accessible route. Between 1974 and 1984, Pakistan is estimated to have issued 21 expedition permits to foreign groups that ascended to peaks near Siachen. But these scientific and mountaineering trips would also sow the seeds for the war to come. In 1977, Colonel Narendra "Bull" Kumar, an Indian Army officer and expert high-altitude mountaineer, came across a map apparently shared by a German climber wanting to ascend the Siachen glacier from the Indian side. The map showed the LoC not ending at NJ 9842 but continuing in a north-eastward direction all the way to Karakoram Pass, effectively claiming the territory west of the line for Pakistan. In Kumar’s mind, Pakistan had not just drawn a line. It had crossed one. After sharing his discovery with his superiors, Kumar was instructed to lead an expedition onto the glacier in 1978. The Indian expedition approached from the Nubra Valley on the Indian side, moving on to the glacier from its snout in the south and moving northwards up the glacier. In the ensuing years, both countries monitored each other’s activities and as tensions built, mountaineering expeditions gave way to military patrols. Indian mountaineer and writer Joydeep Sircar described these competing Siachen trekking missions as "oropolitics" — the mixing of mountaineering and politics — in a paper published in the Alpine Journal in 1984. Of the Indian Army expedition members of the 1978-81 period, Sircar observed that the climbers “were as handy with Ichapore automatics as they were with iceaxes”. Then, on April 13, 1984 — the same year that Sircar’s warning was published — the Indian Army launched Operation Meghdoot, or Cloud Messenger. A team of 20 Indian soldiers landed on Bilafond La, the most important gateway to the glacier, the same pass used by the earliest mountaineers decades before. Four days later, 20 more men were air-dropped by helicopters onto Sia La, another pass on the Saltoro Ridge at 18,850 feet. Pakistan discovered the Indian presence only by chance, when a senior military official spotted movement during a routine helicopter patrol on April 18. Realising the scale of its intelligence failure, the Pakistan military scrambled its teams and within four days, had also moved towards the glacier, occupying whatever elevated positions they could reach. In Heights of Madness, journalist Myra Macdonald’s 2007 book on the Siachen conflict, “it was two months before they even started to fight, as though both sides found it hard to grasp what was going on, staring at each other across the snow, surprised to find themselves and the enemy up on these strange heights”. The first combat death was in June 1984, when Lance Naik Chanchal Singh, an Indian soldier manning a post on Bilafond La, was shot by Pakistani fire. Today, the two armies are not on the actual glacier — but instead at various points along the 110km-long Saltoro Ridge, a zigzagging, punishing range of peaks forming the western flank of Siachen. India holds control of all three major passes, Bilafond La, Sia La, and Gyong La on Saltoro Ridge, while Pakistan controls the lower western slopes of the Saltoro Mountain. But to gain and keep control of elevated positions along the ridge, both sides have suffered losses over the years, with feats of remarkable courage from their soldiers. The most celebrated battle took place in June 1987 at 21,000 feet. Pakistan’s Quaid Post commanded the vertical advantage over Indian positions near Bilafond La. The Indians launched a mission with a single objective: their soldiers would capture the post or would not return. Leading a team of five using rope and axes, Captain Bana Singh scaled a near-vertical wall of ice at nearly 80 degrees in minus 45 degrees Celsius over six hours, before the Indian soldiers overran the Pakistani post, killing all six men, as he later described to Macdonald for her book. Bana Singh was the first person to score a bayonet kill at such heights. The post was renamed in his honour, and six months later, he was awarded India’s highest military decoration, the Param Vir Chakra. The tales of courage continued. Pakistan’s Captain Naveed-ur-Rehman and Sergeant Muhammad Yaqoob took a 40-foot drop over the Chumik glacier on the Saltoro Ridge under a hail of Indian fire in April 1989. Captain Naveed survived, but his heroism came at a price: his entire body was frostbitten and he spent four months in hospital. Sergeant Yaqoob had both hands amputated. Still, their mission succeeded, with Pakistani mortar shelling instigating an avalanche that buried a nearby Indian post and killed several men. But the sheer brutality of this battle had exhausted even these two stubborn militaries, and they agreed to a ceasefire in May 1989. The private mood on the Pakistani side was captured in an anonymous commander’s diary entry from that same period, later quoted by journalist Macdonald in her book. “The Indians have been stupid in coming into this area; we have been sentimental idiots in trying to grab the remaining peaks,” he wrote. “Instead of wasting our meagre resources and banging our heads against ice walls, we should fall back.” The almost deal A near-resolution was playing out at a different altitude a month after the ceasefire, among the diplomats and politicians in their leafy enclaves. Of the 13 rounds of talks the two countries engaged in since January 1986, the closest they came to a long-term deal on the glacier was in June 1989, the fifth round that took place in Rawalpindi. A change of government in Pakistan, after the death of General Zia ul-Haq, had ushered in democracy. When Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and India’s Rajiv Gandhi met in December 1988, relations had thawed. The late Humayun Khan, who served as Pakistan’s foreign secretary at the time, recalled that Indian Defence Secretary Naresh Chandra’s approach during the June 1989 talks was “much more positive than his predecessors”. An agreement was soon reached. “It was agreed that both sides would withdraw their forces to pre-Simla positions, once verified by the two military sides,” Khan told this reporter some years ago, before he passed away in 2022. The late Chandra only half-corroborated this account when this reporter spoke to him a year before his passing in 2017. “While we did agree to ‘redeploy’ the troops instead of ‘withdrawal’, it was meant to be done only after consultation between the officials of two armies. But our primary disagreement remained over the accusation that India had violated the Simla Agreement [by climbing onto Siachen],” he had said. The shadow of the two militaries loomed over the talks throughout. The Indian army, holding advantageous positions near the glacier, did not want its diplomats to make any military concession. Pakistan’s army was not eager for a ceasefire either, on the grounds that the conflict was helping drain Indian coffers. When Bhutto agreed to meet the two foreign secretaries, Khan and Shilendra Kumar Singh from India, she also sought approval of Pakistani Army Chief General Aslam Beg over the joint statement. Chandra believed a genuine opportunity had been lost. “When the joint statement was finalised, it was only me and Zaidi in the room. A roadmap was agreed for the army to implement on the ground. It was a gentlemen’s agreement and we said to each other there will be no explanation to the media,” he told me, referring to Ijlal Haider Zaidi, the Pakistani defence secretary. What happened instead was that the two foreign secretaries spoke to the media and gave the impression that a breakthrough was imminent. By the time the Indian foreign secretary’s plane landed back in New Delhi, there was chaos. India flatly denied any agreement to retreat. Shilendra Kumar Singh “had his knuckles rapped sharply on his return to Delhi because it was felt the photographs of Indian troops withdrawing from Siachen would not look too good for the government in an election year,” Indian journalist — and later minister — MJ Akbar wrote in The Telegraph in August 1992. Singh had to resign. Even though senior military planners met in Delhi in July 1989, the goodwill had been punctured. By August, it was evident the war would continue. The joint statement issued on June 17, 1989 – the document that briefly appeared to offer a way out – had stated that the two sides would work towards a settlement “based on redeployment of forces to reduce the chances of conflict, avoidance of use of force and the determination of future positions on the ground ... to conform to the Simla Agreement”. Its final clause was the one that mattered most: “The army authorities on both sides will determine these positions.” The military, in other words, had been handed the pen. The result was never in doubt. Salman Bashir, who served as Pakistan’s foreign secretary between 2008 and 2012 before becoming High Commissioner to India, told this reporter that “Siachen, like some others, is not a necessary issue” for the neighbours to fight over. Yet both countries have shown inflexibility on their primary demands. India refuses to move until Pakistan accepts legally binding authentication of the current position of Indian troops on Saltoro Ridge — which would effectively acknowledge Indian control over this patch of contested territory. Pakistan, on the other hand, argues that troops must step back to where they were before the Simla Agreement was signed in 1972. That would mean a major retreat for Indian soldiers. Even the ceasefire of November 2003 didn’t help — instead, both sides hardened their stance in the years that followed. Ashraf Qureshi, a Pakistani diplomat who later served as an ambassador before his retirement, was part of the ninth round of talks in May 2005. He pointed to the statement by then-Indian army chief General J J Singh, who publicly declared before the talks that India’s gains on Siachen achieved at the cost of martyrs must not be bartered away at the negotiating table. “This was perhaps the first time the Indian military establishment had clearly pronounced itself over an issue that was essentially political,” the Pakistani diplomat told this reporter. Lieutenant-General Deependra Singh Hooda commanded India’s Northern Command – the formation with direct operational responsibility for Siachen – until his retirement in 2016. He is blunt about why India will not move. “India holds the dominating positions along the Saltoro Ridge,” he told this writer. “It would therefore not want to withdraw without an authentication of the current positions on a map agreed by both sides, to ensure that the Pakistan Army does not occupy these heights after an agreement on demilitarisation.” Indian defence analyst and former army colonel Ajai Shukla, who has followed the conflict for decades, agrees but argues that there is also a “mismatch of expectations” between the two sides: Pakistan views Siachen in isolation, while for India, it is part of the larger Kashmir dispute. India’s military, according to Shukla, has also come to regard Siachen as a laboratory for its expertise in high-altitude warfare, an asset with value well beyond the glacier itself. Meanwhile, Chinese infrastructure developments in the Shaksgam Valley, Hooda added, make India’s continued presence in the Siachen sector a strategic imperative that goes beyond the bilateral dispute alone. The Shaksgam Valley – the territory Pakistan ceded to China under their 1963 border agreement – has since seen substantial Chinese road and military infrastructure development. “In a climate marked by a lack of trust, no move forward is possible,” Hooda said. After 1989, there was one more moment when the two sides came close to an agreement, in 2006. Riaz Mohammad Khan, then Pakistan’s foreign secretary, and his Indian counterpart Shyam Saran had worked out the structure of a deal under what the two countries called a Composite Dialogue. Pakistan proposed that the disengagement schedule from Siachen be recorded on maps annexed to an overall accord, a formula that in effect addressed New Delhi’s longstanding demand for the formal acknowledgement of its control positions as part of the deal itself. India had agreed. The matter was considered done, but it was not to be. According to Saran’s account in his 2017 book How India Sees the World, the proposal was brought to a Cabinet Committee on Security meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. India’s National Security Adviser MK Narayanan “launched into a bitter offensive” against it, citing distrust of Pakistan and anticipated political opposition. Army Chief JJ Singh – who had “happily gone along with the proposal in its earlier iterations” – reversed his position and joined Narayanan. Manmohan Singh “chose to keep silent,” Saran recalled. The conclusion Saran drew was unsparing: The opportunity to “finally resolve a long-standing issue and a constant source of bitterness in Pakistan was lost”. According to Riaz Khan’s op-ed in Dawn newspaper in January 2022, when he raised the matter again at the next round in 2007 with Saran’s successor Shiv Shankar Menon, the response was a single sentence. “On that issue we have to get back to you,” Menon said. India never did. Pakistan at the time was governed by General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled until 2008. It was under Musharraf that the November 2003 Siachen ceasefire had been agreed to, and under his government that the 2006 composite dialogue talks, the closest the two sides came to a settlement after 1989, were held. Khan, who led Pakistan's delegation in those talks, told this reporter in a recent conversation that he still believed "there was a genuine chance" for a deal at that time. “Musharraf and Manmohan Singh had agreed. Shyam and I showed the agreed text to them. The next day, literally before we were hoping to sign, the Indian side backed out,” he said. The 13th and final round of talks was held in Rawalpindi in June 2012. Nothing has followed. No appetite to fight, no appetite to withdraw Those June 2012 talks came in the immediate shadow of catastrophe. Just two months earlier, on the night of April 6 and 7, the Gayari avalanche had swallowed 140 Pakistani soldiers and civilians. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s then army chief, suggested in the aftermath that unilateral withdrawal from Siachen was worth considering. For a brief moment, the scale of the loss seemed to have cracked open a conversation that decades of attrition had not. But the June 2012 talks produced no breakthrough. What filled the silence was not diplomacy but escalation. In February 2019, a suicide bombing in Pulwama killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in Jammu and Kashmir. India responded with air strikes on Balakot inside Pakistan. The two countries were again on the verge of war. Six months later, in August 2019, India revoked Article 370 of its constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special autonomous status and reorganising it into two federally governed territories. For Pakistan, it was the most consequential unilateral act India had taken on Kashmir since 1947. Less than two years later, in February 2021, a quiet restoration of the Line of Control ceasefire – under Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan – offered a faint signal that some floor still existed beneath the bilateral relationship. But by May 2025, India and Pakistan were exchanging missile and drone strikes in their most intense military confrontation since Kargil. The Saltoro Ridge was silent throughout – the glacier’s ceasefire held even as everything around it collapsed – but the consequences for Siachen’s future were direct and immediate. During the conflict, Indian military assessments concluded that China had shared satellite intelligence on Indian troop movements with Pakistan. For India’s strategic establishment, this was not a revelation. It was a vindication. The Saltoro Ridge, India has always argued, is the only natural terrain barrier separating Pakistani and Chinese military coordination. That argument, already deeply entrenched, has only hardened since. Still, Shukla sees something measured in the glacier’s silence through the 2025 war. “Both sides are able to manage escalation, both conventional and nuclear,” he said. “This indicates that the military and the civilian leadership of India and Pakistan are able to manage their confrontations with a level of professional wisdom and maturity that is laudable.” Moeed Yusuf, who served as Pakistan’s national security adviser when the Line of Control ceasefire was quietly restored in February 2021, has an explanation rooted more in strategic necessity than in “maturity”. “There isn’t an appetite on either side to fight a war over Siachen at this point,” he told this writer. “The nature of warfare is changing such that you will not have all fronts opened up or activated in a limited conflict.” Hooda, however, cautions against reading too much into that silence. “It is more a practical consideration,” he said. “Soldiers on both sides are more concerned with combatting the terrain and weather conditions.” The ceasefire, in his assessment, remains structurally fragile: what the May 2025 conflict demonstrated was not the glacier’s permanence as a de-escalated space, but its continued vulnerability to the fluctuations in temperature of the bilateral relationship. Tughral Yamin, a Pakistani military analyst and a former brigadier who has followed the conflict for decades, however, argues that the fact that last year’s war did not spill over onto Siachen reveals something both sides have quietly accepted for years. “Siachen has transitioned from an active conflict zone to a frozen status quo, literally and politically. The silence on the ridge is not a sign of peace. It is a sign of disengagement without reconciliation,” Yamin told this writer. Neither side will say it officially, but what several former officials like Yamin from both countries suggest, in essence, is that Siachen is today a tacitly de-escalated space: too costly to fight over, yet too dangerous to abandon. And that the silence on the Saltoro Ridge during last year’s fighting was the product of an unspoken understanding that Siachen no longer belongs to the active battlefield, even when everything else burns. That doesn’t mean that a resolution to Siachen is on the cards, though. Bashir, the former Pakistani envoy to New Delhi, believes that “if and when political relations change for the better, Siachen could be solved”. But Sharat Sabharwal, who served as India’s high commissioner to Pakistan between 2009 and 2013, cannot see that scenario unfolding. “Given the intensity of the trust deficit, I do not see demilitarisation of Siachen moving forward,” Sabharwal told this writer. The irony? The man most often credited as the architect of India’s Operation Meghdoot, Lieutenant-General (retd) Manohar Lal Chibber, had on multiple occasions spoke of the futility of the very war he helped launch. In an interview given in Karachi in May 2000, Chibber said: “It is not worth slogging it out on the world’s highest battle ground. I am sure a solution can be found.” Chibber died in 2021. His advice remains ignored. The war continues On April 20, 2025, Naib Subedar Baldev Singh of the 18th Battalion, Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, died at Kumar Post on the Northern Glacier. He had served in the Indian Army for 23 years and was in the Signals Platoon, the unit responsible for keeping India’s lines of communication to Siachen open. The Indian Army did not reveal the exact circumstances of his death. The statement was the customary one: he had made the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty. His body was taken to his family in Sirsa, Haryana. He left behind a wife, Gurvinder Kaur, a son aged 13 and a daughter aged eight. Indian Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi, who had personally mentored Baldev Singh when he headed the same battalion years earlier as a colonel, came to the Base Hospital at Delhi Cantonment to lay a wreath. It was not merely a ceremonial gesture, the Army said, it was a farewell by a former comrade-in-arms. Two days later, gunmen killed 26 civilians in Pahalgam, sparking outrage across India, and setting the stage for the war that would erupt on May 7. Nine years earlier, Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad’s death had stopped a nation. A prime minister visited the hospital. A billion people watched. The country mourned at length and in public. Baldev Singh was mourned, too, but quietly, and briefly, with the country’s attention already fixated elsewhere. For four days, India and Pakistan fired missiles and drones at each other. Air raid sirens became the soundtrack to the lives of hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the border, as real attacks and rumours mixed seamlessly to leave two of the world’s most populous nations gripped in a state of anxiety neither had witnessed in decades. When a ceasefire was announced on May 10, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. A bigger war between nuclear-armed enemies had been averted. Schools that had been shut in border districts in India and Pakistan reopened. In the giant megapolises of the two countries, life started to stumble back to normalcy. But high up on Saltoro Ridge, the two armies were still in position, entrenched and unmoved. The ceasefire changed nothing in Siachen. There was no normalcy to stumble back to. The war against nature and each other was still on. A year later, it still is.