Mountain of war: The India-Pakistan conflict’s deadliest battle zone
No appetite to fight, no appetite to withdraw Those June 2012 talks came in the immediate shadow of catastrophe. Just two months earlier, on the
No appetite to fight, no appetite to withdraw Those June 2012 talks came in the immediate shadow of catastrophe. Just two months earlier, on the night of April 6 and 7, the Gayari avalanche had swallowed 140 Pakistani soldiers and civilians. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s then army chief, suggested in the aftermath that unilateral withdrawal from Siachen was worth considering. For a brief moment, the scale of the loss seemed to have cracked open a conversation that decades of attrition had not. But the June 2012 talks produced no breakthrough. What filled the silence was not diplomacy but escalation. In February 2019, a suicide bombing in Pulwama killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in Jammu and Kashmir. India responded with air strikes on Balakot inside Pakistan. The two countries were again on the verge of war. Six months later, in August 2019, India revoked Article 370 of its constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special autonomous status and reorganising it into two federally governed territories. For Pakistan, it was the most consequential unilateral act India had taken on Kashmir since 1947. Less than two years later, in February 2021, a quiet restoration of the Line of Control ceasefire – under Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan – offered a faint signal that some floor still existed beneath the bilateral relationship. But by May 2025, India and Pakistan were exchanging missile and drone strikes in their most intense military confrontation since Kargil. The Saltoro Ridge was silent throughout – the glacier’s ceasefire held even as everything around it collapsed – but the consequences for Siachen’s future were direct and immediate. During the conflict, Indian military assessments concluded that China had shared satellite intelligence on Indian troop movements with Pakistan. For India’s strategic establishment, this was not a revelation. It was a vindication. The Saltoro Ridge, India has always argued, is the only natural terrain barrier separating Pakistani and Chinese military coordination.
That argument, already deeply entrenched, has only hardened since. Still, Shukla sees something measured in the glacier’s silence through the 2025 war. “Both sides are able to manage escalation, both conventional and nuclear,” he said. “This indicates that the military and the civilian leadership of India and Pakistan are able to manage their confrontations with a level of professional wisdom and maturity that is laudable.” Moeed Yusuf, who served as Pakistan’s national security adviser when the Line of Control ceasefire was quietly restored in February 2021, has an explanation rooted more in strategic necessity than in “maturity”. “There isn’t an appetite on either side to fight a war over Siachen at this point,” he told this writer. “The nature of warfare is changing such that you will not have all fronts opened up or activated in a limited conflict.” Hooda, however, cautions against reading too much into that silence. “It is more a practical consideration,” he said. “Soldiers on both sides are more concerned with combatting the terrain and weather conditions.” The ceasefire, in his assessment, remains structurally fragile: what the May 2025 conflict demonstrated was not the glacier’s permanence as a de-escalated space, but its continued vulnerability to the fluctuations in temperature of the bilateral relationship. Tughral Yamin, a Pakistani military analyst and a former brigadier who has followed the conflict for decades, however, argues that the fact that last year’s war did not spill over onto Siachen reveals something both sides have quietly accepted for years. “Siachen has transitioned from an active conflict zone to a frozen status quo, literally and politically. The silence on the ridge is not a sign of peace. It is a sign of disengagement without reconciliation,” Yamin told this writer. Neither side will say it officially, but what several former officials like Yamin from both countries suggest, in essence, is that Siachen is today a tacitly de-escalated space: too costly to fight over, yet too dangerous to abandon.
And that the silence on the Saltoro Ridge during last year’s fighting was the product of an unspoken understanding that Siachen no longer belongs to the active battlefield, even when everything else burns. That doesn’t mean that a resolution to Siachen is on the cards, though. Bashir, the former Pakistani envoy to New Delhi, believes that “if and when political relations change for the better, Siachen could be solved”. But Sharat Sabharwal, who served as India’s high commissioner to Pakistan between 2009 and 2013, cannot see that scenario unfolding. “Given the intensity of the trust deficit, I do not see demilitarisation of Siachen moving forward,” Sabharwal told this writer. The irony? The man most often credited as the architect of India’s Operation Meghdoot, Lieutenant-General (retd) Manohar Lal Chibber, had on multiple occasions spoke of the futility of the very war he helped launch. In an interview given in Karachi in May 2000, Chibber said: “It is not worth slogging it out on the world’s highest battle ground. I am sure a solution can be found.” Chibber died in 2021. His advice remains ignored. The war continues On April 20, 2025, Naib Subedar Baldev Singh of the 18th Battalion, Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, died at Kumar Post on the Northern Glacier. He had served in the Indian Army for 23 years and was in the Signals Platoon, the unit responsible for keeping India’s lines of communication to Siachen open. The Indian Army did not reveal the exact circumstances of his death. The statement was the customary one: he had made the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty. His body was taken to his family in Sirsa, Haryana. He left behind a wife, Gurvinder Kaur, a son aged 13 and a daughter aged eight. Indian Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi, who had personally mentored Baldev Singh when he headed the same battalion years earlier as a colonel, came to the Base Hospital at Delhi Cantonment to lay a wreath.
It was not merely a ceremonial gesture, the Army said, it was a farewell by a former comrade-in-arms. Two days later, gunmen killed 26 civilians in Pahalgam, sparking outrage across India, and setting the stage for the war that would erupt on May 7. Nine years earlier, Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad’s death had stopped a nation. A prime minister visited the hospital. A billion people watched. The country mourned at length and in public. Baldev Singh was mourned, too, but quietly, and briefly, with the country’s attention already fixated elsewhere. For four days, India and Pakistan fired missiles and drones at each other. Air raid sirens became the soundtrack to the lives of hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the border, as real attacks and rumours mixed seamlessly to leave two of the world’s most populous nations gripped in a state of anxiety neither had witnessed in decades. When a ceasefire was announced on May 10, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. A bigger war between nuclear-armed enemies had been averted. Schools that had been shut in border districts in India and Pakistan reopened. In the giant megapolises of the two countries, life started to stumble back to normalcy. But high up on Saltoro Ridge, the two armies were still in position, entrenched and unmoved. The ceasefire changed nothing in Siachen. There was no normalcy to stumble back to. The war against nature and each other was still on. A year later, it still is.
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