Inter-Community Relations in Leh, Ladakh
Yoginder Sikand

Ladakh, the northern-most part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, occupies almost two-thirds of its territory but accounts for just 2.7 % of its population. Ladakh consists of two districts: Kargil and Leh. Both the districts have a roughly equal population of a little more than a hundred thousand people. The majority of the population of Kargil, some 85 %, are Shi‘a Muslims, most of whom belong to the Balti community. The remainder are mainly Buddhists, in the Zanskar valley, with a small minority of Sunni Muslims in Padum and Nurbakshi Muslims in the Dras area. In Leh, the overwhelming majority of the population is Buddhist, with a minority of Sunni, Shi‘a Balti and Nurbakshi Muslims, who account for roughly 15 per cent of the population. Muslims are found in 25 out of the 112 villages of Leh. In most of these villages they form scattered minorities, although in some villages near Leh and in the Nubra Valley they account for a substantial proportion of the population. There is also a small Christian minority in the district.

Much has been written about the history of Buddhism in Ladakh. On the other hand, little literature is available about Ladakh’s various non-Buddhist communities. Likewise, the complex history and nature of inter-community relations in Ladakh still remains neglected and little-known. This chapter provides a broad overview of the different non-Buddhist communities in Leh district and of their relations with the Buddhist majority. Through a number of interviews with religious specialists as well as ‘ordinary’ believers, it seeks to highlight the diverse ways in which these communities relate to each other. The focus here is on the ‘problem areas’ in these relationships, such as rigid and insular ways of looking at the religious ‘other’. The chapter also looks at the possibilities of evolving alternate ways of understanding religion, specifically Buddhism and Islam, to take cognisance of the multi-religious reality of the Leh district.

Muslims and Christians in Ladakh: A Brief Note

The Sunnis are the largest religious minority in Leh. They form around 6 % of the district’s population, and are almost entirely of mixed Kashmiri-Ladakhi background. This explains why they are often referred to as Argons or ‘mixed race’. They are more commonly known as Khacha Pa, the word Khacha Yul meaning ‘Kashmir’ in the Ladakhi language. In addition to the Kashmiri element, some Argons also claim Turkistani and Central Asian descent.

According to a leading Argon historian, Abdul Ghani Sheikh, Sunni Islam’s first contact with Ladakh goes back to the eighth century, when Arab soldiers and traders began entering the area. He writes that by the mid-seventh century Arab armies had already conquered large parts of central Asia, which had close historical ties with Ladakh. In the late eighth century, during the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mahdi (775-85), Arab armies reached as far as Tibet and had demanded tribute from the Tibetans. It is probable, Sheikh argues, that some Arab soldiers entered Ladakh at this time, although the available documentary evidence is fragmentary. Local legend has it that the Persian Sunni scholar and Kubrawi Sufi, Mir Sayyed ‘Ali Hamadani, who played an important role in the introduction of Islam in Kashmir, passed through Ladakh in 1381/2. He is said to have built a mosque at Shey, then the capital of Ladakh, and at Padum, in Zanskar, although this is disputed. Not long after his visit, some Muslim mystics of the Rishi order, such as Baba Zainuddin Rishi and Baba Nasiruddin Ghazi, are said to have travelled to Ladakh and Baltistan, and are credited with having made some converts to Islam in the area. The spread of Islam in Ladakh is said to have further accelerated after the conversion to Islam of the Ladakhi Buddhist ruler of Kashmir, Lha-chen-dngros-grub in the early fourteenth century.

Ladakh witnessed a new influx of Muslims from the sixteenth century onwards, as Sunni Muslim traders from Kashmir began settling in the region. They were key players in the trans-Himalayan trade network along the Silk Route connecting West Asia with Tibet and China. They were welcomed by the Ladakhi Rajas, who saw them as playing a valuable role in the local economy. They were allotted their own special quarters in the capital city and lands to construct mosques. They married local Buddhist women, and the Argons of today are descended from these unions. The Sunni community in Ladakh was further augmented after Ladakh became a vassal of the Mughals in the reign of Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. Ladakhi rulers invited a number of Kashmiri Muslims to join their court as scribes to conduct official correspondence, in Persian, with the Mughal governors of Kashmir, and also to help run the royal mint. At this time Sunni Muslims also began settling in small numbers in the Zanskar area in Kargil, as assistants to the local Buddhist rulers as well as traders.

The Shi‘as of Leh are almost all of Balti stock, ethnically similar to the Buddhist Ladakhis and the western Tibetans. They trace their conversion to the sixteenth century Mir Shamsuddin Iraqi, who is credited with introducing Shi‘a Islam in Kashmir and Baltistan. He and his disciples are said to have been responsible for the conversion of a number of Balti Buddhist princes to the Shi‘a faith. Many of the local Shi‘as, it is said, are descendants of migrants from Baltistan. They claim that they settled in Leh in the early seventeenth century, when the Ladakhi Buddhist ruler Jamyang Namgyal (1555-1610) married Gyal Khatun, daughter of Yebgo Sher Ghazi, the Shi‘a prince of Khaplu. Gyal Khatun is said to have brought along with her a number of Balti Shi‘as in her retinue. They were later accompanied by another group of Baltis who shifted to Ladakh following a devastating flood in Baltistan. Their descendants are now to be found in fairly sizeable numbers in Phyang, Shey, Chushot, Thiksey and Leh.

A third Muslim community in Ladakh are the Nurbakshis, followers of the fifteenth century Persian mystic Sayyed Muhammad Nurbaksh. Nurbaksh’s own sectarian affiliation is disputed. Some claim that he was a Sunni of the Shafi’ school and a Kubrawi Sufi. Others insist that he was a Shi‘a who concealed his faith out of fear of Sunni persecution. The Nurbakshis in Ladakh are today found chiefly in the Nubra Valley and in some villages near Dras, in Kargil. Larger numbers of Nurbakshis lives across the border in Baltistan, in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Today, they are increasingly being targeted by Sunni and Shi‘a missionary groups, who are now engaged in a fierce competition to bring them to their respective folds.

Although the consciousness of adhering to two different religious systems remained strong, Buddhists and Muslims in Ladakh historically shared a broadly similar culture. The local Muslims spoke Ladakhi and wore the same dress, often with minor differences. Food habits were, to an extent, similar, except for the consumption of alcohol and carrion, which are forbidden in Islamic law. Given the Buddhist prohibition of killing animals, all the butchers in Ladakh were Muslims, and many Buddhist communities specially imported Muslim butchers from Kashmir and Baltistan to settle in their villages. At the popular level there was, in some cases, a blurring of religious boundaries. For instance, in several outlying areas Muslims would visit Buddhist oracles and healers for cures, and some Buddhists would attend the Balti mourning rituals for Imam Husain. Another revealing example in this regard is that of the royal ceremonies on the occasion of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. The Raja would pass through Leh at the head of a large procession, followed by his cavalry. The Buddhist head of the cavalry would visit the Sunni mosque in the town, offer oil for the lamps in the mosque, and ask for the blessings of the local imam.

Intermarriage between Argons, Baltis and Buddhists in Ladakh was fairly common until recently. Such marriages occurred among both ‘ordinary’ people as well as among the royalty. Thus, for instance, as mentioned above, the seventeenth century ruler of Ladakh, Jamyang Namgyal, married Gyal Khatun, daughter of the Shi‘a ruler of Khaplu. Gyal Khatun remained a Muslim till her death, but she was regarded by many Buddhists as an incarnation of the White Tara, probably because her son, Singe Namgyal, rose to become the most famous ruler of Ladakh, playing a crucial role in the expansion of both Buddhism and the geographical boundaries of the Ladakhi kingdom. Another Ladakhi Raja, Nima Namgyal, was married to a Muslim princess, Zizi Khatun, who is said to have exercised a major role in running the affairs of the kingdom. Raja Pirang Namgyal married Begum Wangmu, daughter of a small Shi‘a principality in Kargil. The son of the last independent ruler of Ladakh, Thundup Namgyal, also had a Muslim queen. Likewise, Hurchu Khan, the Shi‘a ruler of a principality in Kargil, married a Ladakhi Buddhist princess.

The historical records speak of numerous wars were between the Ladakhi Buddhist kings and the Shi‘a Muslim rulers of various small principalities in Baltistan. At the same time, they also mention a large number of marriages between the Shi‘a and Ladakhi ruling houses. Political alliances often cut across religious boundaries. Thus, for instance, when Ladakh was invaded by a joint Tibetan-Mongolian army in 1681, the Ladakhi ruler appealed to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for help. In response to this request, the Mughal army, under Nawab Fidai Khan, entered Ladakh and, along with the Ladakhis, inflicted a heavy defeat on the invaders. In gratitude for this assistance, the Ladakhi ruler allotted a plot of land just below his palace in Leh to the Sunni Muslims of the town for a mosque. The mosque, which still stands, is now the central or Jami‘a mosque of the Sunnis of Ladakh. In other words, one cannot speak in terms of a history of any inherent antagonism between Muslims and Buddhists, as entire communities, in the region. Ladakh has never known the sort of communal violence that many other parts of India have witnessed.

Christians form a small minority in Leh. There are no ethnic Ladakhi Catholics, all the local Christians being members of the Moravian church, one of the oldest evangelical Protestant denominations that has its roots in Eastern Europe. The founder of the church, John Hus, was a member of the faculty of Prague University. In his time the Catholic church had assumed control over the churches in Bohemia and Moravia, and sought to forcibly impose its own liturgy on them. Hus and his followers fiercely opposed this, insisting that the Bible, not the Pope, represented the true standard of Christian belief. For his defiance, he was condemned by the Catholics as a heretic and burnt at the stake in 1415. After his death, a group of his followers broke away and set up the Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum in Latin) in 1457. Today, the Moravians have a fairly strong presence in western Europe and North America. They identify themselves as an evangelical church, and are involved in missionary work in many countries, inspired by their belief that Christianity represents the only way to salvation.

The presence of the Moravian church in India dates back to 1853, when its first missionaries landed in Calcutta. Three years later they established a mission in Keylong, the main town in the largely Buddhist district of Lahaul, in what is now Himachal Pradesh, adjoining Ladakh. In 1885 they received permission for a permanent station in Leh. The last of their foreign missionaries departed in the early 1950s and they were replaced by local Ladakhis. There are some 150 ethnic Ladakhi Christians today. Most of them live in Leh, Shey and Khaltse. The vast majority of them are of Buddhist origin, although a few of them claim Balti and Argon descent. In recent years a number of Buddhist and Hindu Nepalis, mainly employed as workers in restaurants and shops in Leh, are said to have joined the church as well.

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Inter-Communal Relations in Leh: Recent Developments

Traditionally, as pointed out above, relations between the principal communities in Leh district, the Buddhists, Shi‘as and Sunnis, have been fairly cordial. However, recent years have witnessed a marked deterioration in relations, owing primarily to various political developments. This finally culminated in a social boycott by the Buddhists of the Muslims of Leh district, declared and enforced by the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) in 1989. The boycott remained in force till 1992, and witnessed several clashes between Buddhist and Muslim youth, incidents of police firing in which three people lost their lives, the burning down of several Muslim homes and even cases of forced conversion of Muslims to Buddhism. During the boycott Buddhists who visited their Muslim relatives or patronised Muslim shops were penalised by LBA activists, and social relations between the two communities were almost completely severed. Relations between the Buddhists and Muslims in Leh have improved after the lifting of the boycott, although suspicions still remain.

The boycott came as a culmination of a series of agitations spearheaded by local Buddhist groups against what they saw as Kashmiri Muslim ‘colonialism’. No sooner had Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union than the Buddhists of Ladakh began protesting against Shaikh ‘Abdullah and the Kashmir-dominated state. The first budget of Jammu and Kashmir after 1947 allocated no funds for Ladakh, and, in fact, the region had no separate plan till 1961. In May 1949, Chewang Rigzin, President of the Ladakh Buddhist Association, sent a memorandum to the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; pleading that Ladakh should not be bound by the outcome of a plebiscite in the state if the majority of its inhabitants chose to join Pakistan. He suggested that Ladakh be governed directly by the Government of India or be amalgamated with the Hindu-majority parts of Jammu to form a separate province or else be incorporated into East Punjab. Failing this, he said, Ladakh would be forced to consider joining Tibet. Nehru shared the LBA’s concerns, but urged it not to insist on its demands on the grounds that any constitutional or administrative action could weaken India’s stand on Kashmir in the United Nations.

The LBA then began to press for greater internal autonomy for Ladakh. It demanded the formation of a Ministry of Ladakh Affairs headed by a popularly elected Ladakhi member of the Legislative Assembly; adequate representation in the legislature and civil service; more development funds for constructing roads and canals and promoting agriculture and horticulture; and replacement of the Kashmiri police by local personnel. It wanted Ladakhi in the Tibetan or Bodhi script to be made the medium of instruction in schools in place of Urdu, and special provisions to be made for facilitating higher education and training in medicine, law, engineering, agriculture and forestry. It argued that Ladakh should bear essentially the same relationship with the state of Jammu and Kashmir as that between Kashmir and India, with the local legislature being the only competent authority to make laws for Ladakh.
In the years that followed, state allocations for Ladakh increased and the state government set up a ten-member Ladakh Development Commission, but these were seen as inadequate steps by the Buddhists of Leh, who kept up their demand for autonomy. Thus, in turn, led to growing political differences between the Ladakhi Muslims and Buddhists. In 1969, the alleged desecration of a Buddhist flag by a Muslim, the stoning of the Jami‘a Masjid and Imambara in Leh by a Buddhist procession, and subsequent reactions in Kargil, led to a heightening of the communal divide. The Buddhist Action Committee raised a number of demands, including Scheduled Tribe status for the Ladakhis, settlement of Tibetan refugees in Ladakh, construction of a rest house in Kargil, recognition and introduction of the Bodhi language as a compulsory subject till the high school level, and provision of a full-fledged cabinet minister to represent Ladakh. Some of these demands were met by the state government but the others were not accepted, perhaps because they were strongly opposed by the Muslim Action Committee in Kargil, who feared that this would result in further Buddhist domination. The Shi‘a Muslims of Kargil now began to see their interests as being inextricably linked to Kashmir, despite a complete absence of cultural and ethnic ties with the Kashmiri Muslims, the vast majority of whom, in contrast to the Kargilis, are Sunnis.

In 1980, police firing on Buddhist agitators demanding regional autonomy resulted in the setting up of the All-Party Ladakh Action Committee to spearhead the autonomy movement. Shortly after, a parallel Kargil Action Committee was set up, constituted by the National Conference and the Congress, which demanded provincial status for the two districts of Leh and Kargil on the pattern of the Jammu and Kashmir divisions. The Kargilis were, obviously, apprehensive of being included along with the Buddhists of Leh in an autonomous Ladakh. Taking advantage of these divisions, the state government used the Kargil Action Committee’s stand to reject the demand for Ladakhi regional autonomy on the plea that all Ladakhis did not want it.

The outbreak of militancy in Kashmir in 1989 convinced many Buddhists in Leh that their future was insecure in Jammu and Kashmir. Many of them feared what they saw as a possible Muslim takeover of their land. This fear was strengthened both by the Kashmiri demand for total independence or merger with Pakistan of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, including Ladakh, as well as the fact that the population growth rate in Kargil was considerably higher than in Leh, which meant that in a few decades the Buddhists would be in a clear minority in Ladakh as a whole. To add to this were continued charges of neglect by the Kashmir government and discrimination against Buddhists in fund and project allocations and government jobs. The question of regional autonomy for Leh was now increasingly being framed in communal terms, as a Muslim-Buddhist conflict.

A scuffle between a Buddhist youth and four Muslims in Leh on July 1989 set off a major agitation in Leh. This led to clashes in Leh town, which then spread to other parts of the Leh district. The Jammu and Kashmir Armed Police are said to have fired at Buddhist demonstrators, killing some of them. They are also alleged to have forcibly entered Buddhist homes, desecrated objects of worship, resorted to indiscriminate beating of locals and looting of property. These actions led the LBA to embark upon a violent struggle, once again demanding the separate constitutional status of a Union Territory for Ladakh. Shortly after, the LBA declared a complete economic and social boycott of the Muslims.

The boycott was initially directed at the Kashmiri Muslims, who controlled the local administration, as well as the Argon Sunni Muslims, who dominated the economy of Leh town, and who were seen as ‘Kashmiri agents’ and as opposed to the Buddhists’ demand for autonomy. The Baltis were later also included after they made common cause with the Sunnis, who presented the conflict as a communal one. The boycott was finally lifted in 1992, after the Government of India convinced the LBA that it would not consider its demands if it carried on with the boycott. An agreement was then entered into by the LBA and the Ladakh Muslim Association (LMA), which represented both the Shi‘as and the Sunnis of Leh. The Government of India, after much procrastination, then set up the Leh Autonomous Hill Council, providing the Leh district with considerable internal autonomy. With this, many of the demands of the LBA were met.

In 1995, when the Leh Autonomous Hill Council was set up, the Kargilis were offered a similar deal. They, however, declined, believing that it would undermine the authority of the Kashmir government, whom they tended to look upon as their ally. However, probably witnessing the considerable development that Leh has seen in recent years, partly because it now enjoys a degree of autonomy, the Kargilis agreed to the setting up of the Kargil Autonomous Hill Council, which came into being in 2003. This, however, has been met with stiff resistance from the Buddhist minority in the Zanskar region in Kargil, who see the move as against their interests, and who have now started demanding a separate autonomous territory for themselves.

The setting up of the Leh Autonomous Hill Council appeared to have settled matters somewhat, to begin with. However, in 2000, when the then Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Farooq ‘Abdullah, tabled a resolution in the state assembly calling for the restitution of the pre-1953 status of Jammu and Kashmir as an autonomous entity within the Indian Union, the LBA once again protested and demanded that Ladakh be declared a Union Territory. The LBA feared that if the pre-1953 status were restored, Ladakh would be turned into a ‘colony’ of Kashmir. In the wake of a week-long stir in Leh in June 2000, the LBA President Tsering Samphel insisted, ‘The only way out is to let Ladakh assume a Union Territory status’. He declared that if the LBA’s demands were not met, it would ‘approach the United Nations, pleading to somehow protect our cultural identity’. Lobzang Nyantak, the leader of the LBA’s youth wing went to the extent of cautioning the state and Union governments that, ‘The God-fearing folk of this region would be forced to take up arms if their long-pending demand remained ignored…[and] it will only be for the administration to blame if we happened to resort to the warpath. It [violence] may appear anti-religious, but the motive, nonetheless, is to protect our identity’. Not surprisingly, the LBA’s demand for the trifurcation of the state on essentially communal lines was warmly welcomed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, who are said to have established close links with the LBA, seeing it as an ally against the Muslims.

The vast majority of the Buddhists of Leh are said to solidly back the Union Territory demand, and some Muslims of Leh have also supported it. However, it is likely that some local Muslims oppose the demand, for fear of being dominated by the more advanced Buddhists, although they are careful not to be vocal in their opposition. Likewise, the majority of the Muslims of Kargil are vehemently opposed to Union Territory status for Ladakh. They refuse to consider joining Leh because they feel that Kargil, considerably poor and under-developed compared to Leh, would suffer neglect at the hands of a Buddhist-dominated administration. Further, they also do not wish to separate from Muslim-majority Kashmir, although, at the same time, most Kargilis do not support the secessionist struggle in the Valley. The ongoing political tussle which underlies the communal schism is further exacerbated by the fact that the Ladakh region, including Kargil and Leh, has just one parliamentary seat. During elections, Buddhist and Shi‘a leaders are said to consistently pander to communal prejudices to mobilise votes for this one single seat. A possible solution to this problem is, as some people have suggested, to increase the number of parliamentary seats to two, one each for Shi‘a-majority Kargil and Buddhist-majority Leh. Alternately, the single seat could be allocated on a rotational basis, for one term to Leh and for the next to Kargil.

Although the roots of the communal divide in Leh are, thus, largely political, they also have an underlying religious dimension. Religion in Leh is, as elsewhere, often used as a mobilisational device by politicians, both Muslims as well as Buddhists, that leads to further mistrust between the communities. Besides, several religious leaders appear to have a very negative image of other communities and their religions. These understandings, in turn, are contested by some of their co-religionists, who seek, in their own ways, to promote better relations between the communities. The following section provides glimpses into these diverse and deeply contested ways of understanding and imagining Islam, Buddhism and Christianity in the context of contemporary Leh.

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In his early 30s, Namgyal is a lama at the Thiksey gonpa, a sprawling centuries-old monastery some 15 kilometres from Leh. Like most other lamas, he has spent most of his life in the monastery, having entered it when he was just seven. Life in the monastery follows a strict routine. Namgyal spends most of the day reading Buddhist texts, teaching these to junior lamas, and officiating at prayer ceremonies in the monastery as well as in people’s homes.

Namgyal’s family lives in a village which has a sizeable Muslim minority. Most of the Muslims in his village are Baltis, with only a few Argon families. He tells me that relations between the different communities were fairly cordial till the boycott of 1989. Inter-marriage was quite common. In fact, an aunt of his is from a Balti family, while his father’s cousin sister is married to an Argon. While such marriages were not approved of, they still happened. ‘For a few days there would be opposition from both sides’, he says, ‘but soon the families would reconcile themselves to the situation’. Inevitably, such marriages ended up in the wife converting to the husband’s religion. Namgyal claims, and he is probably right, that more Buddhist women than Muslim women married outside their community.

Everyone I have met in Ladakh points to 1989 as the turning point in Buddhist-Muslim relations. Namgyal was not very clear as to what exactly triggered off the conflict that year. ‘I hardly step out of the monastery, so I really am not aware of what’s happening in the world outside’, he explains. He tells me that he has heard that it was a scuffle between by a group of Sunni Muslims and Buddhist youth in Leh that set of a chain counter-attacks that finally culminated in the declaration of a economic and social boycott of the Muslims by the Buddhists. ‘I am not sure if we should have instituted the boycott’, Namgyal says. Boycotting an entire community is not in accordance with the Buddhist dhamma, he tells me, although he admits that several lamas were also involved in instituting the boycott at several places. ‘These were younger lamas who do not have a proper knowledge of Buddhism’, he claims. On the other hand, he says that some other lamas tried to oppose the boycott but were forced to keep silent by Buddhist youth who had, as he puts it, ‘simply gone out of control’.

Namgyal confesses to know little about Islam, but simply says, ‘All religions are good. They all teach love and compassion. Who knows, Ram, Krishna, Christ and Muhammad may all have been forms of the Buddha’. He, therefore, sees no reason why one should convert to another religion or seek for others to do so. ‘Let everyone serve his own religion and in that way we can all live together in peace’, he stresses. Right action, rather than religious beliefs, he goes on to tell me, are of central importance. One can learn and adopt the good things in other religions without abandoning one’s own religion. It is pointless proclaiming the superiority of one religion over the other if one does not actually practice true religion, which, as Namgyal defines it, is a form of inspiration that gives one peace as well as leads one to help those in need. The main aim of the Buddha’s mission was to end suffering, and this means that one should be concerned about the sufferings of all creatures, not simply of one’s co-religionists. Different religions, Namgyal believes, are different ways for proper living, and are devised to appeal to people with different mentalities. ‘The three poisons of ignorance, desire and hatred, are found inside you. Kill them by following the noble eight-fold path of the Buddha and all your enmities will be destroyed’, he says. All religions, so Namgyal claims, teach the same thing.

At the same time, however, Namgyal opines that many Muslims he knows are ‘overly aggressive about their religion’, but he makes a distinction between the Baltis and the Argons. He sees the Baltis as being closer to the Buddhists than the Argons are. After all, he reminds me, their ancestors were Buddhists at one time, and the speak the same language (with some minor variations in Kargil), look the same and share many cultural practices in common with the Buddhists. ‘They are simple, hardworking and honest people, not quarrelsome like the Argons’, he says. He contrasts them with the Argons, whom he describes as ‘crafty and untrustworthy’. ‘Before the boycott the Argon youth were very aggressive. They would tease our girls in the streets and leave no opportunity to pick a fight with anyone’, he claims.

Namgyal echoes a view that many Ladakhis, Muslims and Buddhists express, that relations between the Buddhists and Muslims have drastically been transformed as a result of the boycott. ‘We are not as close as we were before’, he says. Inter-marriages, fairly common in the past, are now rare. Many Muslim women, he says, somewhat in complaint, now wear head-scarves, something hitherto unknown in Ladakh. Traditional Muslim wedding ceremonies, accompanied by music and dance, are being replaced by simple functions. Fewer Muslims now attend the festivals at the monasteries. In the past, he says, several Muslims, mainly Baltis, would come to him to ask him for prayers to cure a range of illnesses, but now few do. He sees this as a result of ‘the propaganda of the mullahs’, but, when I point out that it may, in part, be a reaction to the sufferings they underwent during the boycott he hesitatingly agrees.

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X works for the Ladakh Buddhist Association, an organisation of mainly lay Buddhists that spearheaded the boycott of the Muslims. I met him at the LBA office, which is situated in the premises of the Jokhang monastery, near the Sunni mosque in the heart of Leh’s main bazaar.

‘The boycott began because some Argons teased a group of Buddhist girls in Leh’, X claims, offering a slightly different version of the events from what Namgyal provides. Some Buddhist youth protested, and this then led to clashes in the town. In some villages, he admits, Muslim houses were burnt down and families were forced to flee to Leh. Three lives were lost in police firing in Leh and in the nearby village of Shey. Many Kashmiri traders in Leh were forced to close their shops and go back to Kashmir. The boycott lasted for some three years, kept alive, X proudly says, by the LBA, and supported by numerous lamas. ‘We forbade Buddhists from buying things from Muslim shops or travelling in Muslim vehicles’, he gloats. The boycott finally gave over after the Muslims and Buddhists promised to stop inter-religious marriages. However, he warns, ‘These things are still happening, and many more Muslims are marrying Buddhist girls than the other way round. If they continue like this the situation might become volatile again’. He repeats the claim that I have heard many Buddhists make that the Muslims offer monetary inducements to Buddhist girls to convert and marry Muslim men, an allegation that many Muslims rebut.

I ask X if he believes that the boycott and the ensuing violence were in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha. He hesitates and thinks for a while. ‘It is true’, he replies, ‘that the Buddha taught non-violence and compassion for all creatures’. ‘At the same time’, he says in his defence, ‘the Buddha taught that we must protect our religion, which is what the boycott intended to do’. He goes on to tell me the story (apocryphal or not, I do not know) of a Buddhist monk who killed a man because the otherwise the man would kill 999 other people. In this way, he says, the monk saved so many lives by taking just one. ‘If we simply preach compassion’, he tells me, ‘Buddhists will become extinct in Ladakh and the Muslims will take over’. He refers to Afghanistan and the Kashmir Valley, which were Buddhist at one time. The Buddhists there, he says, ‘stuck to compassion’, and that was why Islam was able to ‘drive Buddhism out’ from these regions. He compares that with the situation in Ladakh today, where, he says, if the Buddhists do not get organised to protect their religion Islamist militants will take over.

I can empathise with his predicament, although I cannot agree with his justification for a boycott of an entire community. I refer to the stance of the Dalai Lama during the boycott crisis, reminding him that the Dalai Lama had condemned the boycott and had urged Buddhists and Muslims to solve their differences peacefully. At this, X suddenly does an about-turn and stutters: ‘Yes, maybe the boycott was wrong, maybe it was un-Buddhist’. He, however, continues to maintain that it was a ‘natural reaction’ to Kashmiri and Argon ‘wrong-doings’.

After the lifting of the boycott Buddhist-Muslim relations in Leh are now ‘almost normal’, X tells me, although irritations remain, such as the continued intermarriages. He tells me of how visiting each other’s houses, a common occurrence in the past, has now declined, a result of the boycott. The boycott has also affected the local economy. In the past most of the shops and vehicles in Leh were owned by the Argons and Kashmiris, but during the boycott the Buddhists set up their own shops and bought their own vehicles. Now, he tells me, the Buddhists dominate Leh’s economy, a fact that many Argons resent.

X, clearly, has a low opinion of the Muslims. ‘They do not have any respect for us and our religion’, he complains. ‘From childhood they learn that k stands for kafir, so how can you expect them to love us?’. He talks about how many Muslims now consciously seek to distance themselves from the Buddhists, abandoning many local customs and practices and becoming more self-consciously ‘Islamic’. He claims that the Muslims are ‘inherently militant’, so much so that ‘they cannot resist fighting among themselves’. He talks about Sunnis in Kargil who took out a pro-Saddam demonstration during the Gulf War and were beaten up by Shi‘a youth to back his claim. ‘The Shi‘as and Sunnis actually detest each other but put up a united front against the Buddhists’, he claims. He also tells me of what he and many Buddhists see as the looming threat of Islamist militancy spreading to Ladakh, although he admits that the militants enjoy little support among the local Muslims, particularly the Baltis. He refers to the killing of three lamas of the Rangdum monastery in Zanskar by militants some years ago, and says, ‘If the militants have their way they will destroy all our monasteries’.

The LBA, X tells me, is ‘passionately pro-India’. He makes the obvious point that joining Pakistan is simply not an option for the Buddhists. ‘We’ll be wiped out there if we do’, he says. Ideally, he explains, Ladakh should be separated from Jammu and Kashmir and made a Union Territory. ‘We have nothing in common with the Kashmiris and so there’s no reason why we should stay on with them’.

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Dr. Tashi Paljor is the Principal of the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (CIBS) at Choglamsar, near Leh, one of the leading Buddhist research and teaching institutions in India. Originally from Lahaul in Himachal Pradesh but having lived in Ladakh for many years, he is a well-known authority on Ladakhi Buddhism.

Paljor tells me about the Buddhist solution to the problem of inter-religious conflict. ‘The Buddha taught’, he says, ‘that we should treat all creatures as our own mother, for in one of our past lives they could have been our mother’. The enemy is within, rather than without. If the ‘internal enemies’, of desire, jealousy and envy, are destroyed, the enemy no longer remains. There is no need for religious conversion, he argues. One should remain in one’s own religion, discarding anything in it that might not appeal to reason, while not hesitating to take the good things from all other religions. Following the path of compassion (karuna) of the Buddha one should love all creatures, including people of different communities, equally, and work for the end of all forms of suffering. In this way, he says, all human beings, indeed all created beings, can be happy. The key lies in overcoming the ‘illusion’ of the self, the ego, the atma, which is the cause for desire and which inevitably leads to conflicts of all forms. Overcoming the ‘illusion’ of the ego, one is led to realise the ‘principle of interconnection and interdependence’ between different creatures, which, in turn, leads to a healthy respect for religious pluralism.

That, however, is fine in theory, I reply, but what about the situation in Ladakh? What about the problematic relations between Buddhists and Muslims? Paljor tells me that many Muslims regard Buddhists, like other non-Muslims, as ‘enemies of God’ or at least as followers of ‘falsehood’. ‘This is a major problem in promoting good relations’, he complains, although he does say that following the lifting of the boycott things have improved. Now that Leh has its own Autonomous Hill Council, Buddhist-Muslim relations are back to ‘almost normal’, but Paljor believes that there is no guarantee that the Kashmir government will not seek to dilute the powers of the Council. That is why, he says, many Ladakhi Buddhists, including the LBA, are now demanding Union Territory status for Leh.

Paljor introduces me to Geishe Konchok Namgyal, who teaches Buddhist philosophy at the CIBS. Namgyal describes Buddhist-Muslim relations in Ladakh as ‘a unique model’, and says that, barring the period of the boycott, there have been no incidents of conflict between the two communities in the past. It is true, he says, that Ladakhi Buddhist kings sometimes fought with Muslim kings, such as the Shi‘a rulers of Skardu and Baltistan, but these were not communal riots or religious wars. They did not involved entire communities, but only professional armies. Many of the Buddhist kings had Muslim soldiers and even Muslim wives. Likewise, numerous Shi‘a kings married Buddhist women. Even today, Namgyal informs me, in some remote areas, such as in Dah-Hanu in Kargil, there are families in which one brother is a Muslim and the other a Buddhist.

Namgyal admits that the boycott had a major impact on Buddhist-Muslim relations. It was, he says, wrong to boycott an entire community, but he argues that the Buddhists did have genuine grievances, which then led to ‘ a mob mentality’ which then ‘went out of control’. With Leh having now been granted its Autonomous Hill Council, in which Muslims are also represented, he opines that a repeat of the boycott will not happen. But, he says, religious leaders must play a pro-active role in promoting better relations between Muslims and Buddhists, because that is not a task that can be left to the politicians alone. He tells me that the CIBS has invited Muslim leaders to attend functions, such as receptions for the Dalai Lama. In turn, sometimes Muslim leaders invite Buddhist lamas to Muslim gatherings. But, he admits, this is not done in any organised way as such.

*

The Mahabodhi International Meditation Centre occupies a sprawling campus outside the Tibetan refugee settlement of Choglamsar, not far from Leh. The Centre is engaged in a variety of activities, including promoting education, healthcare and interfaith dialogue, and represents a new form of socially engaged Buddhism. Smala Phuntsog works as a doctor in the Mahabodhi Karuna hospital that the Centre has recently opened. He is also the secretary of the Leh chapter of the Oxford-based International association for Religious Freedom (IARF).

Religions between Muslims and Buddhists in Ladakh, he tells me, have traditionally been harmonious. He explains the boycott as an ‘aberration’ and as a ‘political thing’. Yet, he stresses, organised efforts must be made to promote inter-faith dialogue, especially because the youth are increasingly ‘straying from the path of their elders’.

Phuntsog hands me a bunch of leaflets about his Centre, including some that detail its own role in promoting communal harmony in Leh. The Centre has held a number of inter-faith meetings, the latest being just a month before, which was sponsored by the IARF. At the latest meeting Sunni, Shi‘a, Buddhist and Christian religious leaders spoke on the importance of peace and harmony from the perspective of their own religions. The meeting culminated in a peace march through the streets of Leh, raising slogans in support of peace. The previous year, a similar meeting was jointly sponsored by the local Sunni and Shi‘a community organisations.

‘Live and let live’ is Phuntsog’s answer to my query as to how people of different faiths can live together. Since no humans think exactly alike, they should be free to believe in whatever they want, and must respect the freedom of others to do so. He tells me how at the Centre there are a number of Muslim employees as well as students in the Centre’s school. ‘We all live together here at the Centre, no problems at all’, he says.

The Buddhist way of dealing with religious pluralism, Phuntsog tells me, is through tolerance and dialogue. He recites an excerpt from the daily morning Buddhist prayer to illustrate this approach: ‘May all sentient beings be happy and free from misery. May this state be for all’.

*

The Shi‘a mosque in Leh is located at the foot of the grand palace of the Ladakhi kings. It has recently been renovated in Iranian-style, but its painted beams, with their intricate floral designs still betray the Tibetan-style architecture of the original structure. The mosque serves as a major community centre for the Shi‘as of the town, who are almost all Baltis, with a small minority of Kashmiri Shi‘a traders.

I met Husain at the mosque one evening as the prayers got over. Husain is a Balti and runs a small shop in town. Like many other Baltis, he complains of the discrimination that he claims that his community suffers both from the Buddhists as well as the Sunnis. ‘We are the poorest and least educated community in Ladakh’, he tells me. ‘This world and its glamour are not for Muslims’, he explains. ‘Let non-Muslims enjoy the luxuries of this world. We will enjoy bliss in the hereafter, while others will suffer in hell’.

Part of Husain’s family is Buddhist—his mother was Buddhist before she married his father—but yet Husain has a low opinion of the Buddhists. ‘They have no sense of shame or modesty’, he says. ‘They drink and dance and make money by selling their religion to foreign tourists’. That is why, he says, they are economically better off than the Baltis. For the Baltis, he says, ‘religion is more important than anything else in this world’. Many Buddhists may be very nice and gentle human beings, Husain admits. But still the fact that they worship idols, he believes, means that they are ‘impure’.

The Baltis, Husain tells me, refuse to eat food cooked by the Buddhists or any other non-Muslims. ‘So strict are some of us in this regard that the mere physical touch of a non-Muslim is considered to be polluting, which can only be purified through a bath or by cleaning the part of the body touched with mud’, he says. This Balti practice is said to be evenly more strictly observed in Kargil, where Baltis are in an absolute majority.

This is the first time that I hear about a Muslim form of untouchability, and I ask Husain to explain. ‘Our maulvis’, he replies, ‘tell us that it is written in the Qur’an that the kafirs are polluted (najis) and that is why we do not eat their food’. Not surprisingly, Husain confesses not to know Arabic and not to have read the Qur’an himself. ‘This is what the maulvis tell us, and we must listen to what they say because they have read the Qur’an’, he says in his defence when I tell him that I have read the Qur’an myself but have not come across any reference to the claim that non-Muslims must be treated as untouchables. ‘Yes’, Husain replies, ‘That is what the Sunnis also say. They have no problem about eating Buddhist food, but the Sunni interpretation, our maulvis tell us , is wrong’.

Another reason why the Baltis refuse to eat food cooked by Buddhists, Husain explains, is that the Buddhists drink alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam. ‘So strict is the Islamic prohibition on drinking’, he tells me, that Imam ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, whom the Shi‘as, in particular, deeply revere, ‘once stated that if a drop of alcohol fell into a pond and the pond later dried up and grass sprouted there, and if a goat ate the grass the animal should not be eaten’. ‘So how’, says Husain as he winds up his little sermon, ‘can we eat Buddhist food?’.

At the same time as Husain thinks that the Buddhists, being non-Muslims, are ‘impure’, he also says that Islam does not forbid friendship with the Buddhists or other non-Muslims. He refers to a verse of the Qur’an that forbids Muslims from criticising the deities worshipped by others because others might, in turn, criticise Allah. The Qur’an also says, he informs me, that God does not forbid Muslims from dealing justly with those non-Muslims who are not aggressors and who leave Muslims alone in peace. Husain tells me that it was, in part, due to the efforts of a Balti politician, Akbar Ladakhi, that the Buddhists as well as Baltis (although not the Argons) finally had their demand for Scheduled Tribe status accepted, as a result of which he was held in high esteem by the Buddhists as well. Akbar Ladakhi’s grandfather, he claims, was so widely respected by the Buddhists that he was appointed as a manager of the Hemis monastery, the largest monastery in Ladakh. ‘Despite not eating their food they were so close to the Buddhists, so there is really no problem at all’, Husain argues.

Husain tells me that he has a number of Buddhist friends and also regularly visits them and his several Buddhist relatives. Although Buddhists willingly eat food cooked by Baltis, he says, when Baltis visit Buddhist houses they accept only ‘dry’ food, such as biscuits or uncooked things. But biscuits and similar things, I point out, might well have been prepared by non-Muslims in factories, and so how is it, I ask, that these can be consumed? Husain thinks for a while and then answers, ‘These factory-produced things could also have been prepared by Muslims, so in case of food items where the producer is anonymous, we are allowed to eat them’. Similarly, rules of pollution and purity can be relaxed while on a journey, ‘out of compulsion’ (halat-i majburi mai).

We talk about the boycott and Husain tells me that although many Baltis, ‘swayed by the Argons’, initially opposed the Buddhist demand for Hill Council status for Leh, they now are ‘forced’ to support the cause of autonomy because they are a vulnerable minority. He, however, acknowledges that the Hill Council has brought about considerable development in the area, which has benefited many Baltis as well. Autonomy for Leh, he says, is probably a good thing, although, like many other Baltis, he fears that if Leh is separated from Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir the Baltis might suffer. He does not see the possibility of another boycott, as many Buddhists have now opened hotels and operate vehicles and a repeat of 1989 would hurt them badly.

Husain, echoing the views of almost all the Shi‘as I have met in Ladakh, says that the Baltis in general are vehemently opposed to the idea of joining Pakistan. He tells me about how some Kashmiri Sunni traders and government employees working in Leh tell the Baltis that they must support the militant movement against India, but how the Baltis refuse to agree. ‘We look down on the Buddhists but still they treat us very well’, he says. ‘But in Pakistan the Sunnis don’t consider the Shi‘as as physically impure but still the Shi‘as are badly persecuted there’. ‘It’s best for the Shi‘as of Ladakh’, he insists, ‘that Kashmir remain with India’. ‘After all’, he adds somewhat philosophically, ‘we eat the salt of India, so how can we praise Pakistan?’

*

A short distance from Leh, on the other side of the Indus river, is the sprawling village of Chushot, said to be the largest village in the Leh district. The majority of Chushot’s inhabitants are Balti Shi‘as. Chushot boasts of a centuries-old Shi‘a imambara, a congregational hall dedicated to the twelve Shi‘a Imams. The structure has recently been renovated in a decidedly Iranian mode, although a few traces of its earlier traditional Ladakhi appearance are still visible. Inside, the pillared hall is decorated with thick Persian-style carpets, black flags with Arabic slogans embroidered on them, and pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini and other such Iranian religious leaders.

A turbaned Shi‘a cleric stands before a podium delivering an impassioned address, while a large crowd of villagers sits below in rapt attention. It is the birthday of Imam Husain, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and a majlis, a gathering in honour of the Imam is underway. The cleric repeats his point over and over again, about the bravery of the Imam and the tyranny of his killers and so on, till the crowd is driven to loud sobs. The majlis continues for well over two hours and is then followed by a community feast.

The crowd makes its way out of the imambara, and on the steps I meet Hasan, a Balti college student. We walk down to the Indus nearby, and settle down on a sand-dune in the sun. I ask him to tell me about the history of the imambara. It was built a long time ago, he says, but no one knows when exactly. However, he says he has heard of a miracle associated with the shrine, familiar to almost every denizen of Chushot, which he proceeds to relate. Once, he tells me, some dacoits attempted to loot the famous Hemis gonpa, the largest monastery in all Ladakh. They were foiled in this when a range of high mountains suddenly appeared in front of them, blocking entrance into the monastery. The dacoits were then forced to change their plans. They headed towards Chushot, in order to raid the imambara, but when they approached the shrine the Indus river suddenly rose to surround it on all four sides. Just then, Staksan Rinpoche, the head lama of Hemis, passed by and he saw two lions standing outside the imambara, drinking the water of the river so as to prevent it from entering the shrine. From then on, every year the lamas of Hemis sent tea, incense and oil as presents for the imambara. This practice, Hasan claims, carried on till 1989, when the LBA enforced the boycott of the Muslims. In the past, Hasan tells me, the local Buddhists would participate, generally as spectators, in the mourning rituals for Imam Husain at the imambara, but after 1989 this has sharply declined. However, local Buddhist government officials are still invited and some of them do attend.

Hasan is reluctant to speak about the boycott, and tells me that relations between Buddhists and Muslims are now almost ‘normal’. Most of Hasan’s friends are Buddhists. In fact, his mother’s side is partly Buddhist, and his Buddhist relatives often visit his home. Likewise, on festive occasions his family visit their Buddhist relatives, and on these occasions the latter make special arrangements for food to be prepared for them by a Muslim cook. Hasan tells me that he eats food cooked by non-Muslims when he travels out of Ladakh, but he pleads with me not to reveal this to anyone.

Hasan takes me with him to his home, and shows me his impressive collection of books. He hands me a set of issues of the Ladags Melong, Ladakh’s only English-language magazine, and explains that the magazine is a ‘secular voice’. Its editor, Sonam Wangchuk, is a Buddhist, and its two sub-editors, Muhammad Hasnain and Rebecca Norman, are probably, as their names suggest, a Muslim and a Christian respectively.

I skim through the issues of the magazine that Hasan hands me. Most of them deal with local development problems. There are some that deal with the question of Buddhist-Muslim relations, and I make a quick note of these in my diary. One issue highlights the Dalai Lama’s visit to mosques in Nubra and his public lectures, attended by Muslims and Buddhists, where he stressed the importance of communal harmony. Another issue carries an extensive interview with the late Kushok Bakula, a revered Buddhist monk and political leader, who is quoted as appealing to the Ladakhis ‘to be vigilant all the time of forces that seek to divide the Ladakhis in the name of religion and region. Buddhists and Muslims must remain united and maintain their traditional harmony’. A third issue contains a report of a peace rally jointly taken out by Buddhist and Muslim organisations in Leh to pressurise the Indian and Pakistani governments to defuse the tension along the border and to resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue. Interestingly, several issues of the ‘Religion’ page magazine carry selections from the Ladakhi translation of selected verses of the Qur’an that has been jointly undertaken by a local maulvi and a lama.

It is now time for the evening prayer, and as Hasan steps out to complete his ablutions I make way to the main road, three miles away, to get back to Leh.

*

R introduces himself as a ‘Balti, but with a difference’. I think he is bragging, but as we talk I realise that he is right. He is certainly the dissenter that he claims to be. He tells me that he is a committed Shi‘a but that he has ‘no faith’ in most of the local Shi‘a ‘ulama, whom he accuses of having a vested interest in preserving the backwardness of the Baltis. ‘They talk only about heaven and hell and nothing about the problems of the real world’, he complains. ‘Till recently they even used to insist that studying English and Hindi or taking to government jobs would lead us to abandon our religion’, he says, adding that now this opposition is not so vocal ‘because they know that no one will listen to them if they say this’.

The Baltis in Kargil are even more backward than their cousins in Leh, R claims, one factor being that the Shi‘a ‘ulama there have a stranglehold over the community. However, he tells me, things are gradually changing. Several Shia ‘ulama of the younger generation now urge Baltis to go in for modern education, while at the same time also stressing the importance of traditional Islamic learning. Ordinary Baltis, R says, continue to ‘blindly follow’ the ‘ulama, who claim authority on the basis of their supposed superior understanding of Islam. Often, he says, particularly in Kargil, the ‘ulama are used by different political parties to deliver votes to them, for which service some ‘ulama often receive money. This is one major reason why, he says, Balti-dominated Kargil is ‘almost thirty years behind Leh’.

In recent years, R says, a growing number of Balti students have been travelling to other states in India or to Iran to study at madrasas there. The sort of education they receive there is said to be sternly literalist and, in most cases, does not include any relevant modern subjects. This, he claims, ‘makes some of them even more rigid and inflexible in some ways’. ‘They think that they are authorities in matters of religion just they have studied in Uttar Pradesh or Iran’, he complains. Often, they use their new-found authority to collect money from local people in the name of religion. Some of them also try to use their contacts with the Iranians to get money for themselves from abroad, wrongly claiming that they would use it for the welfare of the local Shi‘as. In fact, R tells me, almost no Shi‘a ‘ulama are doing any public service at all. Most of them, he tells me flatly, are ‘just using religion as a lucrative source of livelihood’. ‘The ‘ulama seem least interested in any sort of community uplift work’, he says, noting that there is not even a single Shi‘a madrasa in the whole Leh district. ‘They keep fighting among themselves, supporting one political party or another, one leader in Iran against another one, thereby dividing the community as well’.

We talk about mutual perceptions of each other of Muslims and Buddhists. R thinks that Buddhists are, on the whole, ‘gentle, helpful and peace-loving people’, and that is why, he thinks, they are economically considerably better off than the Muslims in Leh. Most of his friends are Buddhists. In contrast, he says, ‘Muslims keep fighting, with others or among themselves’, because of which the remain ‘backward and ignorant’. Buddhists, he says, as a rule do not condemn others for their religion, but Muslims routinely do so.

I ask R about the Balti refusal to eat food cooked by non-Buddhists. He sniggers and tells me that he regularly eats at his Buddhist relatives’ homes, but has to keep this a secret. In fact, he says, despite the seeming consensus of the local Shi‘a ‘ulama that this is haram or forbidden, many educated Balti youth do surreptitiously eat food cooked by non-Muslims. He tells me that the Balti practice of untouchability is probably nowhere else observed in the Shi‘a world. ‘I’ve been to Lucknow and Hyderadad, where there are many Shi‘as, but they willingly eat Hindu food’, he says. He knows, he claims, of some Shi‘a ‘ulama outside Ladakh who have declared it permissible to eat food cooked by non-Muslims, but says that their views are almost unheard of in Ladakh.

R thinks that the interpretation that the Baltis give of a Qur’anic verse to justify their stance is ‘ridiculous’ and simply a means to promote ‘barriers’ between them and the Buddhists. He claims it is ‘an invention’ of some ‘ulama who ‘want to strengthen their own hold on the community’. ‘If their interpretation were right’, he argues, ‘why would the Qur’an allow for Muslims to eat food cooked by Jews and Christians? ’. ‘How’, he adds, ‘would the Prophet have allowed a group of Christians to pray in the mosque in Medina if he thought them to be physically polluting? How would he have consented to an invitation by a Jew to join him for a meal, alhtough the food was poisoned? How would Islam have spread throughout if Muslims considered others as polluted and stayed away from them? ’.

R tells me that he sometimes raises these questions with the local Shi‘a ‘ulama, but they counter his argument by claiming that while the Qur’an allows for Muslims to eat the food of adherents of ‘heavenly religions’ like Christianity, it does not give the same permission in the case of ‘idol worshippers’, among whom they include the Buddhists. ‘You just cannot argue with these obstinate and hard-hearted people’, R says in despair. He refers to an uncle of his who insists that ‘A pig and a kafir can never be clean, no matter how much you wash them’. He tells me of a certain Balti leader in Kargil who, on the eve of a local election, told his followers that they were not to vote for a Buddhist candidate on the grounds that, as he put it, ‘Kafirs are to be demeaned, not to be elected as leaders’. The leader then went on to allegedly tell his flock, ‘Kafirs are so unclean that if a drop of water touched by them touches you, you must take a bath, so how can you ever think of voting for a Buddhist?’ ‘How ridiculous this is!’, R exclaimsas he relates this story and as I try to conceal my horror.

The Qur’anic verse that most Baltis refer to when they defend their practice of abstaining from Buddhist-cooked food, R informs me, is contained in a chapter of the Qu’ran titled at-Tauba (‘The Repentance’) (9:28). The verse reads as follows:

O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.

Most Baltis, of course, do not understand Arabic, and so rely on their ‘ulama to explain the scripture to them. For their part, R says, the ‘ulama take the verse completely out of context. A close reading of the preceding verses appears to suggest, R says, that the ‘pagans’ referred to here are those who forcibly sought to suppress Islam and the mission of the Prophet, taking up arms against him and his followers. It is thus probably not addressed to all non-Muslims as such, including those, like the Buddhists, who are not violently opposed to the Muslims. In any case, he points out, the verse refers to a ban on entry into the ‘Sacred Mosque’, probably the Ka’ba in Mecca, and does not speak about food at all.

R carries on with his harangue against many ‘ulama, whom, he says, ‘say bad things’ about other religions. R says he believes in Islam, but adds that ‘there are good things in every religion’. He has a number of lama friends, from whom he has learnt a considerable deal about Buddhism. He has read several Buddhist texts, and tells me that there are several things in common between Buddhism and Islam, which, however, many Muslims are either unaware of or do not appreciate. As a rule, Muslims, he says, think that Buddhists are idolators, but, in actual fact, the Buddha condemned the worship of idols. R thinks that the widespread custom of constructing and worshipping idols in the monasteries is a later development. Likewise, he says, many Muslims believe that Buddhists do not believe in God. This, he claims, is not, in fact, true. Admittedly, he says, the Buddha did not talk about God, but he did not deny His existence either. He approvingly cites the story of the Buddha’s disciple who asked him why he did not talk of God. The Buddha replied to him with a parable. If a deer is shot by an arrow, one’s first task is to remove the arrow rather than searching for the person who shot it. Likewise, our principal task in this world is to remove suffering, not to squabble about theological niceties.

Although he reserves most of his ire for the ‘ulama, R is also critical of many lamas. Some of them, he says, just live off the faith of the credulous. They spend their entire lives in prayer and rituals and are not involved in doing anything concrete to change people’s lives. Like any Shi‘a ‘ulama, most of them are not interested in learning about other faiths, believing firmly that theirs’ alone is the way to salvation. In recent years, R tells me, the lamas have become ‘more politicised’. Many lamas are associated with the Ladakh Buddhist Association, which is said to have ‘Hindutva leanings’. R expresses the fear of the possibility of the Hindu rightwing in making inroads into Ladakh by trying to woo the Buddhists and set them against the Muslims.

As a minority, R says, the Muslims must go ‘out of their way’ to seek to build better relations with Buddhists. The ‘ulama have a major role to play in this, he argues, but he laments that they are not doing much in this regard. He talks of how communal prejudices are deeply rooted among both Muslims and Buddhists, and of how what he refers to as ‘narrow minded’ ‘ulama and lamas actually only further reinforce these prejudices. He does mention, however, that some local Shi‘a ‘ulama supported the Iranian government when it offered to pay the Taliban a sizeable sum of money if it refrained from destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas. This stance of the Iranians was widely appreciated by many Ladakhi Buddhists, he tells me.

R insists that the future of his fellow Shi‘as lies with India. That, he says, is a point that even the Shi‘a ‘ulama stress. The ‘ulama say, he tells me, that they will never declare a fatwa of jihad against India unless the mujtahids, leading Islamic scholars, in Iran tell them to do so, but the mujtahids have apparently told them, so he says, that the Shi‘as should be loyal to India. R tells me that Pakistan-controlled Baltistan remains poor and undeveloped, and that ‘no Indian Balti in his right mind would like to migrate there’. Baltistan, he alleges, and is ‘now being flooded by Talibanist-type radical Sunnis’ as part of what he calls a ‘plot to reduce the Shi‘as there into a minority’. He expresses his concern with certain Sunni groups in Kashmir, who might not preach anti-Shi‘a hatred openly but are convinced that the Shi‘as are heretics. ‘If they had their way they would declare Shi‘as as non-Muslims, just as they have done to the Qadianis in Pakistan’, he warns.

He talks me about the oppression of the Shi‘as in Pakistan, something that most Shi‘as in Ladakh readily do. He refers to the gunning down of Shi‘a worshippers in mosques and imambaras there. ‘Thank heavens’, he exclaims, ‘such things don’t happen in Ladakh, where the Buddhists are generally very peace-loving’. ‘The only reason why there’s been no Shi‘a-Sunni conflict here’, he claims, ‘is because the Buddhists are a majority and both the Sunnis and the Shi‘as feel marginalised and so are forced to keep up a face of unity’. He talks of what he sees as the deep differences between the Shi‘as and Sunnis, which both, being minorities in Leh, do not like referring to. Some Sunnis actually think that the Shi‘as are kafirs, although they do not generally openly say this. To stress his point he refers to the Nubra valley in north Ladakh, where Shi‘a and Sunni groups are competing with each other to convert a large group of Nurbakshi Muslims, who are neither Shi‘a nor Sunni.

‘Frankly’, R says to me, ‘only God knows who is right, the Shi‘as or the Sunnis. As far as I am concerned it makes little difference what your religion is if it does not make you a better human being’.

*

Shaikh Mirza is, clearly, the most sensible and level-headed Shia ‘alim I’ve met in all Ladakh. He comes from a family that has produced numerous scholars—his own father was the imam of the main Shi‘a mosque in Leh. After spending more than a decade studying with various Shi‘a scholars in Najaf, Iraq, Shaikh Mirza returned to Leh, taking up employment as an Arabic teacher in a government school. He is retired now, but keeps himself busy with various projects, not least as the imam of the principal Shi‘a mosque.

As we walk through the narrow lanes of the Shi‘a locality Shaikh Mirza tells me about himself. He has three children, including a daughter who is doing her Master’s degree in Jammu University. He sees no problem in girls studying along with boys, he explains. ‘Narrrow-minded mullahs will put up all sorts of objections to prevent people progressing’, he says with a shrug. He tells me, to my surprise, that the Imamia Model School, the only Shi‘a-run school in Leh, has a majority of girls on its rolls, and that they study in the same classrooms as the boys. Some conservative Baltis rave and rant against this, but Shaikh Mirza is insistent that girls’ education is perhaps more important than boys’. To educate a girl is to educate the entire family, he says.

Shaikh Mirza is himself an ‘alim, but he is impatient with many local Shi’a ‘ulama, whom, he says, have little knowledge of the contemporary world. Their knowledge, so he claims, is restricted simply to the religious texts, and they do not know how to apply these in today’s context. Islam, he stresses, is not simply the bundle of rituals that some ‘ulama seem to have reduced it to. ‘Islam teaches us to move along with the times, not to reject modernity altogether’, he explains. He talks about Kargil and the notorious infighting among the Shi‘a ‘ulama there, often on party lines, with rival groups supporting rival political parties. ‘A Balti saying has it that there can’t be two Gods because otherwise there will be global war, two wives cannot live peacefully in the same house; two beggars cannot live in the same lane; and two mullahs cannot live in the same locality without squabbling with each other’, he says in jest. ‘Broadmindedness’, Shaikh Mirza tells me, ‘is a gift from God, whom He gives to whom He wills. It cannot be simply learnt in a madrasa’.

The conversation veers to the topic of Buddhist-Muslim relations in Leh, and we talk about the boycott and its aftermath. Shaikh Mirza insists on the need for improving relations with the Buddhists, and says that Islam positively encourages its followers to live in peace with others. Jihad, in the sense of physical warfare, is allowed only when one’s religion or life is under threat, he points out. In Ladakh, he says, the Muslims enjoy freedom of religion, and so talk of jihad against India is absurd. He dismisses that the notion that Muslims must perpetually be at war with others to expand the boundaries of the ‘abode of Islam’ (dar ul-islam) as ‘un-Islamic’, a later accretion after the time after the Prophet when the Ummayad and later Abbasid Caliphs sought to justify their expansionist designs. If some Muslims still cling to that belief, he says, it is because ‘today everyone claims the right to issue fatwas’. He insists that this right is meant only for the qualified ‘ulama alone, or else, as the happenings in large parts of the world today prove, it can be ‘misused by people to promote their own narrow interests and promote conflict’.

Shaikh Mirza strikes me as remarkably open-minded and I am emboldened to ask him what I think is a provocative question. In strictly legal terms, according to the shari‘ah, I say, many Muslim ‘ulama would not consider the Buddhists as ahl-i kitab, or ‘people of the book’ (such as Jews and Christians), who enjoy the status of ‘protected subjects’ (dhimmis) in an Islamic state. Some Muslim scholars provide only two choices for non-ahl-i kitab: death or conversion to Islam. Shaikh Mirza vehemently disagrees with the latter point. Even if the Buddhists do not believe in God, Muslims must learn to live with them in peace, he insists. ‘God has given life to even animals, so how can we kill someone just because he isn’t a Muslim?’, he asks. To consider all Buddhists, or all non-Muslims for that matter, as ‘enemies of Islam’ is, he says, ‘completely wrong’ because ‘there are good people in every community’. If all non-Muslims were, as some Muslims think, by definition, ‘enemies’, he asks me, why did the Prophet Muhammad invite Christians to pray in his mosque in Medina? To further stress his point he tells me the well-known story of a Jewish woman who would daily insult the Prophet and throw rubbish on him as he passed by. The Prophet tolerated this silently. One day, it so happened that she was absent, and the Prophet, thinking that she might be sick, went to inquire about her health. ‘We need to draw a lesson from this and this is how we must behave with others’, Shaikh Mirza says.

I ask Shaikh Mirza what he feels about the general Balti refusal to eat food cooked by Buddhists. He is somewhat hesitant to commit himself to any position, but he informs me that there is no consensus on the issue among the Shi‘a ‘ulama. I then tell him about a Shi‘a Shaikh I had met the day before who insisted that while conditions in India for the Shi‘as are much better than in Pakistan, the Shi‘as have been, so he put it, ‘enslaved’ by the Buddhists. As ‘proof’ of this claim he mentioned the fact that, out of respect for Buddhist sensibilities, fishing in the Indus river is prohibited, meat cannot be sold on some Buddhist holy days, and cigarette smoking is illegal in buses. With regard to the last point he claimed that it was ‘clearly anti-Muslim’, because the ban had not been extended to drinking alcohol in buses as well. Shaikh Mirza, who knows the other Shaikh well, laughs, somewhat in scorn, when I relate the story. ‘Next time the Shaikh will claim that Muslims are being discriminated against in Leh because plastic bags have been banned here!’, he exclaims, not concealing his disgust.

‘Since we live in a multi-religious society, we all must learn to compromise otherwise we simply cannot co-exist’, Shaikh Mirza urges. He goes on to tell me about his own involvement in local efforts to promote Buddhist-Muslim dialogue. He is often invited by Buddhist groups to speak on the occasion of the Buddha’s birthday, where, he says, he sometimes speaks on Buddhism and Islam, pointing out some of their similarities. He also participates, as a member of the local chapter of the International Association for Religious Freedom, in meetings with Buddhist lamas and scholars that generally have to do with communal harmony. But more than this, he says, is what he calls the unique Ladakhi form of inter-community dialogue: through intermarriage. He offers his own example to stress the point. His wife’s mother is Buddhist, and his wife and her Buddhist half-sister are inseparable friends, visiting each other almost every second day.

Every religion, Shaikh Mirza says, ‘has some good points’. There is nothing in Islam to prevent a Muslim from appreciating the good things in other religions. Since Muslims are supposed to believe that all the various prophets of God taught the same primal religion (din), they must willingly accept the good points in other faiths as well. Shaikh Mirza cites a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: A word of wisdom is the lost property of the believer, and wherever he finds it he can pick it up. That being the case, he says, one can genuinely appreciate the truths contained in other religions, while still being a proper Muslim. He tells me that he, for one, considers the Dalai Lama to be a remarkable man and that he deeply respects him. He recounts the reception that he, along with other local Muslim leaders, once gave to the Dalai Lama on his visit to Leh. The Dalai Lama apparently told the Buddhists present at the meeting that they must consider the Muslim minority to be in their care and protection and must ensure that no harm befalls them. ‘Only a sincerely spiritual person could have spoken like this’, Shaikh Mirza thoughtfully says. ‘If only there were more people like him in the world it would be a much happier place’.

Shaikh Mirza takes me down to the Imamia Model School, the only Shi‘a school of its sort in Leh. It is time for the tea-break, and young boys, smartly dressed in grey trousers and green blazers, and girls neatly turned out in shalwar-kameez, rush out into the courtyard shouting in gless. Some of them come out to greet Shaikh Mirza, who happens to be one of the founders of the school. He speaks with them for a while, asking them about their studies, and then leads me up a flight of stairs to meet the principal, who, it turns out to my surprise, is a Kashmiri Pandit woman. All but one of the four principals the school has had so far, Shaikh Mirza tells me, have been non-Muslims: two Hindus and a Buddhist. ‘Some people say that having a non-Muslim principal might lead the children astray from Islam, but this is not true’, he says. ‘We are interested in good education for our children, and will take it from whoever is capable. What is the use of having an ignorant principal even if he is a fellow Muslim?’.

Shaikh Mirza steps out to meet a teacher, while I sit in the office of Shameeta Pandit, the principal of the school. She sports a large bindi on her forehead and a golden pendant shaped in the Hindu sacred figure of ‘Om’ dangles from her neck. Her family, she says, is from Baramulla in Kashmir, and, like most other Kashmiri Pandits, they were forced to flee and now most of her relatives live in Jammu. She feels ‘quite comfortable’, as she puts it, working in a Muslim institution, and claims that the Ladakhi Muslims are ‘very different’ and ‘more open’ than their co-religionists in the Kashmir Valley. Most of the students in the school, are, of course, Shi‘as, but there are, she tells me, a small number of Sunni, Buddhist and even Hindu students on its rolls. Likewise, most of the 16 teachers in the school are Buddhists and Hindus. She tells me that the Balti practice of refusing food cooked by non-Muslims is ‘intriguing’ since in Kashmir the Muslims readily eat in Pandits’ homes, but she says that the practice is hardly unique. After all, she reminds me, many Pandits continue to practice varying forms of untouchability towards Muslims. ‘I guess it takes all sorts to make the world’, she says thoughtfully.

After the noon prayers get over, Shaikh Mirza returns and takes me on a round of the school. Slogans painted across the neatly whitewashed walls announce piously formulated instructions: ‘We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together’; ‘Read the Qur’an and you will find Allah wants you to be kind’; ‘Happiness is a wondrous commodity—the more you give the more you have’; ‘Education is discipline for the adventure of life’. Framed pictures of Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal and Maulana Azad grace the walls. It is, in short, just like any other school in town. But Shaikh Mirza has reason to be proud, because, as he explains, the school has excelled in a range of fields. He points to a dozen or more shields and cups that grace a large shelf in the visitors room, placed between photographs of the Dalai Lama and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Several of these were won by the students of the school in competitions organised by the local administration, for sports, essay-writing competitions and the march-past on Republic Day. The school’s results in the board examinations have also been equally impressive, I am told.

As he takes me around Shaikh Mirza provides me a brief history of the school. The Baltis were, and still are, the least educated community in Leh, he informs me. ‘Our religious leaders are, in part, to blame for this’, he says. The traditional ‘ulama did not recognise the value of modern education. Some of them genuinely feared it would lead to irreligion, while others thought simply that it would undermine their own authority. Not surprisingly, then, when Shaikh Mirza and his colleagues set up the school there was considerable opposition from the conservatives. Undeterred, the team carried on with their mission, helped, he says, by the local administration and a Christian woman from Britain, who provided the school with a generous grant. Today, he tells me, the local ‘ulama have come to appreciate the work of the school and the importance of modern education, but he laments the fact that most of them are simply not interested in doing anything to promote it themselves. For many ‘ulama, he says impatiently, religion is limited to the four walls of the mosque.

Shaikh Mirza insists that I join him for tea at his home. We settle on thick Persian-style carpets on the floor of his living room, snuggling up to an enormous samovar that bubbles on a wooden stove and he excitedly tells me about his plans for the community. He hands me a chart that describes the new imambara that he and his colleagues in the Anjuman-i Imamia, the local Shi‘a community organisation, are setting up in Leh. In contrast to traditional imambaras, this one will have a library (‘We want to stock books on science and contemporary affairs and on other religions besides Islam as well’, he says), an office that will serve as a community centre and a set of guest rooms. He also tells me about the Az-Zahra Centre that he has helped set up in Leh. The only Balti women’s organisation in Leh, the Centre provides training in crafts and embroidery work to Balti women from poor families and also arranges to sell their products.

All this, Shaikh Mirza tells me, is inspired by his own commitment to his faith. ‘Religion must also be understood in terms of social concern’, he says as he leads me to the door and bids me farewell.

*

Abdul Ghani Sheikh is probably one of Ladakh’s most well-known writers. A retired Indian Information Service officer, he has authored numerous books, including short stories, in Ladakhi and Urdu, and some of his writings have been translated into English as well. He is a Argon community leader and commands considerable respect among the Buddhists as well.

Sheikh tells me that the boycott had an indelible impact on Buddhist-Muslim relations, the scars of which still remain today. During the boycott, he says, Muslims living in far-flung villages in scattered groups had to leave their homes for Leh, where they were granted plots to settle down. Several Muslim houses were burnt, and a few cases of conversions by Muslims to Buddhism, out of compulsion rather than choice, were also reported, but these Muslims, he adds, were in any case just ‘nominal’, already heavily influenced by Buddhism. He points out that the attacks were initially directed against the Argons, not the Baltis, although both were subjected to the boycott. This he attributes to the fact that many Buddhists saw the Argons as their principle enemy, and also because they might have been wary that attacks on the Baltis might lead to similar attacks by Baltis in nearby Kargil against the Buddhist minority living there. At the same time, Sheikh reveals that despite the boycott many Muslims and Buddhists helped each other secretly, especially families that were related to each other through marriage.

Today, Sheikh says, Buddhist-Muslim relations have considerably improved. ‘Ordinary Buddhists are very good people’, he stresses, laying the blame for boycott on local politicians who have a vested interest in promoting what he sees as ‘baseless fears’ about the local Muslims being sympathisers of the Kashmiri militants. He speaks about the work that he, along with several other Muslim and Buddhist leaders, has been engaged in to promote better inter-community relations, referring to the activities of the International Association for Religious Freedom, of which he is a member, in bringing Muslims and Buddhists to sort their problems out through dialogue. He also talks about the role of the Dalai Lama, who visits Ladakh often, and whom the Muslims also greatly respect. ‘When the Dalai Lama heard about the boycott, he refused to step foot inside Ladakh till the LBA lifted the boycott’, Sheikh says. ‘Whenever he comes here’, he adds, ‘he stresses the need for communal harmony and that has a very positive impact on the Buddhists as well as the Muslims’. Not many Ladakhi Buddhists, Sheikh says, heeded the Dalai Lama’s appeal to stop the boycott, but the resident Tibetan refugee community did so, and they remained neutral throughout the period of the boycott. For this, they are said to have been heavily criticised by some Ladakhi Buddhists, and there was even talk for a while in some quarters of extending the boycott to them as well.

Religious leaders have a very crucial role to play in promoting dialogue, Sheikh underlines. He tells me how when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, some Ladakhi Muslim ‘ulama condemned it, and several Muslims joined Buddhists in a dominstration through the streets of Leh. Likewise, when America attacked Afghanistan, a widely respected Ladakhi Buddhist lama is said to have offered special prayers for the suffering Afghans.

Sheikh hands me a set of some of his writings. Most of them have to do with the history of the Argons. A few deal specifically with interfaith issues. One of these is a report of the proceedings of a interfaith conference organised by the Sunni Anjuman Moin ul-Islam in Leh. It refers to prominent Buddhist and Muslim leaders stressing the need for communal harmony. The Director of the Mahabodhi International Meditation Centre is quoted as arguing that all religions teach peace and harmony; Shaikh Mirza, a Balti Shi‘a scholar is mentioned as having stated that Islam teaches peace and affirms that diversity is part of God’s plan; the Sunni Maulvi Abdul Qayyum Nadwi quotes the Qur’an to stress the point that everyone should be free to choose his or her own religion; Togdan Rinpoche, head lama of the Phyang gompa calls for the separation of religion from politics, arguing that conflating the two generally leads to communal conflict; and Tsultim Gyatso of the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies presents the Dalai Lama as a sort of role model to emulate, stressing that he is revered by both the Buddhists as well as Muslims of Ladakh.

‘Meetings and statements like these’, Shaikh says after I finish reading the report, ‘may be small, symbolic things but they can have a powerful influence on people’s thinking’.

*

Maulvi Muhammad ‘Umar Nadvi is the Imam of the Sunni Jami‘a Masjid in Leh. As his title suggests, he is a graduate of the renowned Nadwat ul-‘Ulama madrasa in Lucknow, one of the most well-known centres of Sunni Islamic learning in India. He also holds a degree from Kashmir University and works as the principal of the government middle school in the Buddhist-majority village of Saboo, near Leh.

Nadvi sees himself not simply as a religious functionary, but also as a community activist. Indeed, he is one of the major spokesmen of the Sunni community in Leh, and is involved in various community-related activities. He tells me, for instance, about his work with a voluntary agency LASH (Ladakh Action for Smoking and Health), which conducts anti-smoking awareness camps across Ladakh. He has also served on the board of the Students Educational Cultural Movement of Ladakh, a multi-religious organisation that focuses on educational issues. He is a senior office-bearer of the Anjuman Moin ul-Islam, a local Sunni community organisation, which, among other activities, arranges to collect zakat money for widows and scholarships for poor students. In the village of Saboo, where he teaches, he works with his students, Buddhists and Muslims, to promote awareness about the hazards of drinking. ‘The Buddhists of the village respect me’, he says. He tells me about how an Indian army officer once offered him some money for the local madrasa, but how he, instead, chose to use the money to build a glass room in the school to keep the children warm in the winter.

This message of social involvement, Nadvi tells me, is something that he also preaches from the pulpit of the mosque. In his Friday sermons, he says, he often focuses on social issues. ‘Just last week’, he tells me; ‘I spoke about the need to save electricity, to go in for modern education and to support the efforts of the local administration’. He admits that, often, Friday sermons in mosques are ‘obsessed with rituals’, and are ‘not life-related’, and insists that this has to change.

‘I don’t want to talk about the past’, Nadvi tells me when I ask him about the boycott and its impact on Buddhist-Muslim relations. ‘I am concerned about the future, about peace and how to rebuild our relations’. Despite his various commitments he does take this task with particular seriousness. He tells me that he sometimes speaks on the local radio station on peace and development issues, in which he quotes from both Islamic as well as Buddhist scriptures to make his point. He recently organised a function to celebrate Eid, to which he invited several Buddhist lamas, political leaders and government officials were. Some years ago he organised a seminar devoted to discussion of the role of religion in peace-building. Recently, he, along with some important Buddhist leaders at the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, arranged a large interfaith dialogue meeting, which culminated in a public march by local Muslim, Christian and Buddhist leaders through the streets of Leh, stopping at mosques, churches and monasteries on the way.

Nadvi admits that despite these and other such efforts to promote better relations between Buddhists and Muslims, mistrust remains, particularly among the youth. ‘Many young Muslims and Buddhists have wrong views about each other, but such extremism cannot last long’, he tells me. He is bitterly critical of radical Islamists who denounce other communities as ‘enemies of God’. ‘The Qur’an’, he argues, ‘tells us not to harm anyone, not to abuse others’ religions or hurt their sentiments. It tells us that everyone is free to believe what he or she wants to’. ‘My solution to the communal problem’, he tells me half-jokingly, ‘is that the extremists from all communities should be locked up together in jail. There they will be forced to communicate together, break down their barriers and come to the realisation that all of us are basically the same’.

‘Buddhists and Muslims need to learn about each other’s religions’, Nadvi stresses, adding that this is essential in order to remove misunderstandings and to promote mutual respect. However, he admits, ignorance about other faiths abounds among both communities. Hardly any Islamic literature is available in the Ladakhi language, and writings on Buddhism in Urdu are rare to come by in Ladakh. The problem, Nadvi says, is further compounded by the fact that many Muslims believe that to learn the Tibetan script, in which Ladakhi is written, is almost tantamount to becoming Buddhist. Likewise, many Buddhists are reluctant to learn Urdu, which they see as somehow a ‘Muslim’ language. Nadvi insists that such arguments are, as he puts it, ‘silly’. The different languages, he tells me, are all ‘signs of God’. He himself has learnt the Tibetan script, being probably one of the few ‘ulama in Ladakh to have done so, and is now working with a lama, Geylong Phande of the Phyang monastery, to translate the Qur’an into Ladakhi.

One of the several community projects that Nadvi is involved in is the newly established Madrasa ‘Ulum ul-Qur’an at the village of Thiksey, not far fro Leh. Established in 1997, it is the only Sunni madrasa in the whole of the Leh district. Only a few of the eighteen children in the madrasa are locals, most of them hailing from far-flung areas of Ladakh, including Kargil, Zanskar, Nubra and Dras. Almost all of them are from poor families, and there is not a single child from Leh town, where most Argons are fairly prosperous. As elsewhere in India, madrasa education, here, too, is now associated largely with the poor.

The curriculum of the madrasa is an adaptation of that used in the Nadwat ul-‘Ulama, Lucknow, where most of the leading Ladakhi Sunni ‘ulama have graduated from. The focus is on the Qur’an and the Hadith, the traditions attributed to the Prophet, fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, and Arabic, although basic English and Mathematics are also said to be taught. The medium of instruction is Urdu. No arrangement is made for the teaching of local history, Buddhism or the Ladakhi language.

The madrasa has two teachers, both of whom are from Uttar Pradesh. Neither of them, they admit, have ever had a conversation with a lama. Nor, they say, do they have any knowledge of Buddhism. One of them, however, has visited a monastery. I ask them if they do not think it important to interact with the lamas, because most of the villagers are Buddhists. ‘Yes’, they somewhat hesitatingly agree, but they complain that the work in the madrasa gives them little free time. The village also has a sizeable Shi‘a population, and only one of the teachers, the one who has met a lama, has met with the local Sh‘ia shaikh, and that too only briefly.

I raise this issue with Nadvi, who readily agrees with my point that interaction between religious leaders of the different communities is crucial. ‘I am afraid’, he says, somewhat despairingly, ‘things will take a long time to change’.

*

Ahmad works in a travel agency in Leh. His father is an Argon and his mother is a Buddhist. A college graduate, he is associated with the Tablighi Jama‘at, a reformist Sunni movement which has a small presence in Ladakh.

Buddhist-Muslim relations in Ladakh, Ahmad says, are gradually returning to normalcy, although the effects of the boycott can still be felt. He attributes the boycott to the fact that the Buddhists felt that the Argons and the Kashmiri Sunnis controlled the local economy. This was naturally resented by an emerging generation of modern educated Buddhists. To add to this was the widespread feeling among the Buddhists that the Argons, and, to a lesser, extent, the Baltis, were opposed to the Buddhist demand for autonomy for Ladakh, which, they feared, would lead to Buddhist domination in the region.

Further complicating the situation was the fact of fairly frequent inter-marraiges between was the fact that several Buddhist women were marrying Muslim men. This was not a new development, however, since intermarriage had been occurring for centuries. One reason for this, Ahmad informs me, was that traditionally polyandry was widely practised among the Buddhists, which meant that many of their women were left unmarried. Some of these became chomos, female lamas, while several others married Kashmiri men.

Ahmad tells me that although many Baltis might deny it, the fact that they do not eat food cooked by the Buddhists is greatly resented by many Buddhists, particularly the youth. A common argument put forward by the Baltis for this, he says, is that since the consumption of liquor and the eating of the meat of dead animals is forbidden in Islam they cannot eat food cooked by the Buddhists, many of whom consume liquor and carrion. Behind this argument, however, he says, is the general Balti belief that the Qur’an condemns non-Muslims as ‘impure’.

The Qur’anic verse that the Baltis use to justify this stance, Ahmad tells me, is interpreted differently by the Baltis and the Argons. The verse in question warns the Muslims that the ‘unbelievers’ are ‘impure’. The Baltis take this to mean that all non-Muslims are both physically as well as spiritually impure, and hence refrain from eating food cooked by them. In contrast, the Argons, Ahmad explains, take the verse to refer simply to ‘spiritual impurity’, which allows them to eat non-Muslim food. Ahmad thinks that the Baltis use this verse simply to ‘magnifiy differences between themselves and the Buddhists’. This, he says, is ‘very wrong’. After all, he claims, ‘Islam seeks to bridge differences between people and communities, not to create new ones’. It is particularly important for Muslim minorities to have good relations with the majority community where they live, he says, adding that the Balti practice of untouchability is a major hurdle in promoting better relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Leh.

We talk about the changes that the Argon society are undergoing, particularly after the lifting of the boycott. He sees a growing cultural insularity taking place, with some younger Muslims now consciously seeking to distance themselves from what they see as Buddhist cultural influence. He points to the new structure of the Jami‘a mosque in Leh, which is decidedly ‘Islamic’, having taken the place of the older structure which was almost identical to a Buddhist monastery in its design and floral motifs. Many Muslims have given up traditional Ladakhi wedding ceremonies and customary practices, such as reciting the aurad or litanies in the mosque. Ahmad sees this, in part, as a reaction to the suffering of the Muslims during the boycott. It is also a result of the gradual, almost imperceptible, spread of more scripturalist forms of Islam that are stressed by visiting missionaries of the Tablighi Jama‘at and the local ‘ulama, almost all of whom have been educated at madrasas in other parts of India.

There is a growing realisation among the Argons, Sheikh says, that they must now take to modern education. Earlier, the Argons were mostly traders, and so generally did not take much interest in higher education for their children. That, however, is changing now. The community has now set up its own high school, the Islamiya Public School, a coeducational institution which even has a few Balti and Buddhist students on its rolls. Besides this school and a similar one in the village of Thiksey, the Argons have few other institutions. Unlike the Buddhists, who have many non-governmental organisations, some of which are funded by donors in America and western Europe, the Argons do not run any organisations for the welfare of the community. ‘We are so badly organised’, he laments, and exclaims, ‘What is the use of all this talk about Islam and its glories when we are not interested in helping ourselves, leave alone others?’.

Ahmad tells me about the efforts of local religious leaders in promoting better relations between the different communities. The Sunni Moin ul-Islam and the Shi‘a Anjuman-i Imamia work together on common issues facing Muslims, he says. Shi‘as invite Sunni scholars to address them on the occasion of Imam ‘Ali’s birthday, and the Sunnis reciprocate during the Eid celebrations. Sometimes, Muslim and Buddhist religious and political leaders attend each other’s religious functions. At the same time, ‘ordinary’ Muslims and Buddhists enjoy fairly cordial relations. ‘The situation is much better here than in most of India’, Ahmad stresses. ‘We’ve never had the sort of communal riots as in Gujarat, and God willing, never will’. He also tells me that few Argons support Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan, fearing that their economic conditions would worsen if they severe their ties with India. ‘We have to be pragmatic, in any case’, he stresses, ‘because under no circumstances would the Buddhists of Leh want to live with Pakistan and so we have to go along with them’. In the course of the Kargil war, he tells me, numerous Argons, in addition to Baltis, helped the Indian army, but he complains that this fact has not been highlighted by the media, which further reinforces what he says is the baseless myth of the Argons sympathising with the Kashmiri militants.

*

The Moravian Church in Leh is situated just off the road that passes through the town’s main bazaar. Emblazoned on the iron entrance gate of the church is the Moravian’s logo: a ram carrying a white flag with a red cross. The same emblem is found inside the church, and bears the revealing legend: ‘The Lamb Has Conquered’. The church obviously labours under the firm conviction of Christianity being the only way to salvation, and as being engaged in a cosmic battle with other faiths for global conquest. My hunch is confirmed when I see a set of booklets produced by the Every Home Crusade, Bangalore, kept on a shelf at the entrance of the church.

The neatly-kept and unassuming church is done up somewhat in local style. The wooden beams are decidedly Ladakhi, and chairs have been replaced by cushions laid out on the carpeted floor. The congregation is ethnically mixed, including Tamilians, Ladakhis, Nepalis, Biharis and a man who looks distinctly Kashmiri. Besides, there are a small number of white Europeans and Americans present. I later discover that one of these is a missionary, who has worked in a remote Buddhist village helping the villagers to harvest their fields with a thresher that he has provided. No doubt he has used this as an opportunity to tell the villagers about Christianity.

Elijah Gergen, the pastor of the Church, reads out a passage from an Urdu Bible. This is followed by recitations from the Tibetan and English Bible for the sake of the linguistically mixed group. The pastor then preaches his sermon, which consists of a homily about faith in Jesus. He is obviously convinced that Christ alone is the way to heaven. ‘He who does not have a living relationship with Jesus’, he declaims, ‘is like a lost sheep’. He talks about general morality, love, compassion and so on, but insists that ‘You can be saved only through Jesus’.

After the service gets over, I approach Gergen and I request him for an interview. We agree to meet the next day in his office at the Moravian Mission School, of which he is the principal. The school is said to be one of the best in all Ladakh, although in recent years the Christian monopoly of English-medium education has been challenged with the setting up of a number of similar institutions by Buddhist and Muslim organisations. Gergen is well suited for the post he occupies as head of the mission school—a former lecturer in genetics, he earned a degree in theology from a Christian seminary in Korea.

Gergen proudly tells me that he is a scientist and that he can defend Christianity on ‘purely scientific grounds’. I try to play the devil’s advocate and ask him for scientific proof for the Christian belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity. Gergen probably thinks I am being irreverent. He changes his stance all of a sudden and says, ‘Science is relative truth, while Christ is the absolute truth’.

It comes as no surprise to me when Gergen confesses to believe in the singular, absolute truth of Christianity. Having been present during his sermon the day before, I am well prepared for this admission. He tells me, of course, that Christians must, in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, live in love, peace and harmony with others. That, however, he adds, does not mean that they should renege on what he sees as their fundamental missionary vocation. Since salvation can be had through Christ alone, he asserts, every Christian has the duty of conveying the message of Christianity to others.

Gergen tells me that he has attended numerous interfaith dialogue meetings in Leh, and that he does believe that the different communities in Ladakh must live together in peace with each other. At the same time he says that he vehemently disagrees with a certain approach to interfaith dialogue that seeks to deny the fundamental differences between religions, which leads to such efforts becoming what he calls ‘a complete farce’. ‘Simply by patting each other on the back and saying good things about each other’s religions is not going to lead to these differences melting away’. In fact, Gergen is insistent that the differences are of seminal importance, because, as he sees them, ‘they reflect very different truth claims’. ‘I, as a Christian, believe’, he explains, ‘that Christianity is the only way to salvation. Hence, I cannot and must not deny the differences between Christianity and other religions just to please others’.

I ask him what he thinks about heaven and hell, and he tells me that they are real, physical places. The latter place is where non-Christians will suffer in hell for not having accepted Jesus. So the Bible says, Gergen retorts, when I ask him if he is serious. He defends Christian missionaries who explicitly claim the superiority of their faith. ‘Every proclamation has an in-built rejection, so when someone proclaims his religion he is, at the same time rejecting the other religions’, he impatiently announces as I try to interject. At the same time, and this comes somewhat as a relief to me, he reiterates his earlier point that despite their differences Christians and others must live together in peace.

I am not surprised when Gergen tells me that some Buddhists are increasingly resentful of the Christian missionaries. I tell him the stories I have heard from Buddhist friends of European missionaries, guised as ‘tourists’ and ‘social workers’, taking Buddhist children to Dehra Dun and Srinagar to ‘educate’ them but actually to bring them to Christ. Gergen admits that some missionaries might engage in this sort of what I call ‘bribery’, but insists that he himself is not involved and nor can he be held responsible for their actions. He tells me of a demonstration taken out by a group of Buddhists in Leh in 1987 against a book written by the then pastor of the church, Revered Hishey. The Buddhists were incensed at the contents of the book, whose back cover announced to prospective readers that if they had tried Buddhism and other religions and these had ‘failed’, they ought to try Jesus instead.

The lunch bell rings and Gergen leads me out of the school. In the lane leading to the main bazaar, a group of lamas sit outside the Jokhang temple sunning themselves. In the distance I can see Muslim