WHITE AS THE SHROUD

AFTER NEARLY THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY OF FIGHTING, THE KASHMIR CONFLICT BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN SHOWS NO SIGN OF ABATING. IN FACT, THE FRONTIER LINES ARE BECOMING MORE DANGEROUS AND VOLATILE

Author: Myra Macdonald Publisher: Hurst Price: £25.00

For nearly four decades, Pakistan and India have been embroiled in a bloody struggle for dominion of the Siachen glacier high in the Karakoram mountain range. This forbidding tract of ice demarks a border flashpoint between the two belligerents and China, Pakistan’s ally. To date, the savage terrain and weather have claimed more lives than those lost in combat.

Myra Macdonald first came across the Siachen War on a visit to India’s Ladakh, known as ‘little Tibet’, in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. This has been the scene of conflict since the birth of the Islamic State of Pakistan in 1947, when it split from the newly independent India.

The author enlivens the narrative with personal accounts of those involved in the war, such as the desperate manoeuvring by Indian soldiers, at times on all fours, at 18,000 feet to retrieve the bodies of comrades killed in a reconnaissance mission to a Pakistani outpost.

From the trigger for full-scale war between India and Pakistan, to on-again off-again stalemate, to Pakistan’s crushing defeat in the 1990 Kargil offensive that left 1,000 dead on both sides, to the 2003 ceasefire agreement and successive violation of the Line of Control – the dilemma of settling the Kashmir dispute remains intractable.

“One of the more confounding problems in the vicious circle between Pakistan, China and India is the extent to which all three countries cast themselves as victims,” says the author. In this sense, nationalist pride remains the stumbling block to a definitive peace in this war on the roof of the world.