Ghulam Hussain's father had to travel to Mecca to meet his own brother because the LoC had made their shared village unreachable.
Ghulam Hussain was born in Turtuk, a village at the far western edge of Ladakh, on the banks of Shyok River in Nubra district of Ladakh. In 1971, when Indian forces took Turtuk and two neighbouring villages from Pakistani control during the war, around three thousand people woke up in a different country. Some had relatives on the other side of the new line. They would not see them again.
If LoC is the dividing line, this may mean not seeing them for years, decades, or not at all. After 1971, a Line of Control ran between Ghulam Hussain’s father and his uncle (father’s brother), building parallel lives. They met just once in the last over five decades – not in a familiar Himalayan setting but far away during the Hajj pilgrimage.
"We are wronged," Ghulam Hussain said at a recent online gathering called Thoud-Lukh, "by the people we had expectations from, and whom we thought would help us." The webinar organised by Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy brought participants from Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh to talk about their lesser heard experiences.
Thoud-Lukh is a Balti word. It means mulaqat - an encounter, a meeting, the simple act of seeing someone face to face. In this high-altitude borderland that straddles India and Pakistan, it has become a word charged with longing. The webinar that took its name was the first-ever online meeting of the divided people of Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan: a gathering of writers, poets, journalists, lawyers and activists from both sides of a line they never chose and cannot cross.
The gathering began with water that flows from the Indian side of the border to the Pakistan side, water that divides and connects.
A writer from Kargil described how the rivers of this landscape shaped everything before borders were invented. The Indus, the Zanskar, the Shyok and their tributaries did not just carry snowmelt; they carried trade, language, Buddhism, Islam, Persian influence, Indo-Aryan culture, salted butter tea. The mountain passes, each one called a La, were connectors. Kargil was a trading hub of the Silk Route before the Dogra rulers arrived in the 1840s, before the British drew their lines, before Partition and the wars that followed. The civilisation here is ancient, going back to fourth and fifth centuries.
All of that was interrupted in 1947-48, when the first India-Pakistan war left the region divided. Then again in 1971, when Turtuk changed hands and Ghulam Hussain's family became part of India.
"Ladakh was not just land that was divided," said Sher Ali Anjum, a journalist from Baltistan who spoke at the gathering. "It was people. Families. Culture. A way of life."
So Near, Yet So Far
Advocate Zarina Bano, a lawyer from Kargil, did not use statistics when she spoke. She talked about her aunt. Her father's sister, on the other side. She talked about what it is to know, with perfect clarity, that someone you love is alive and nearby – physically but can’t be reached. Because that’s how people are governed when two neighbouring states permanently become hostile to each other.
The visa regime between India and Pakistan is among the most restrictive bilateral arrangements in the world. For residents of Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan, it is worse still. The territories are sensitive border zones. Passport clearances come with multiple layers of checks. And geographical terrain and barriers make the access even more difficult.
One speaker at the gathering estimated that over the past several decades, fewer than one in a thousand people from the region have managed to visit relatives across the LoC.
"Security and strategic concerns are understandable," Zarina Bano said. "But people must be understood separately from terrorism and violence. There has to be a humanitarian approach."
Bashir Ahmad Wafa, a poet from Kargil, went further. He spoke of a different wound - the wound of being unaware. His people had not been consulted about the division. They had not been warned. They had not been told that their lives were about to be restructured without their participation.
"We had no information," he said. "We were not consulted. No one even bothered to tell us how our lives would be impacted." He has spent decades working to keep the culture and the connections alive - in literature, in language, in the oral record - because neither state has given that culture any official home. The Balti language has no place in any curriculum.
The archives, as a businessman and social activist from Baltistan - Ilyas Hussain - pointed out, are elsewhere. The ancient Gilgit Manuscripts, some of the oldest surviving texts from this region, are held in Britain and in Srinagar, not in Gilgit-Baltistan itself.
Son and Father Meet First and Last Time
Zahra Batool, a broadcaster from Skardu in Baltistan, spoke about her family’s heartrending story.
Before 1947, her family used to travel to Kargil for trade. After Partition, the journey became impossible.
Her husband grew up in Baltistan, raised by an extended family. His father (her father-in-law) had another life waiting for him across the Line of Control in Kargil, with relatives he could not visit, a son growing up that he could not easily reach. When her husband was forty-three years old, his father finally managed to cross. He came. He promised to return. He promised to bring them over too. The joy of reunion was short-lived. Soon after his return to Kargil, after that single meeting between the father and son, the father-in-law died.
"Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh are among the most beautiful regions in the world," Zahra Batool said. "But behind that beauty is an unfathomable pain," she said, summing up the cruel paradox.
Bodies in the river
Several speakers spoke about one major humanitarian crisis in this region - something that has been in news recently – the bodies that are swept by the rivers to the other side and buried far away from the homes and families they belong to.
Sher Ali Anjum explained this in detail. People die here in accidents on the narrow roads that are curvy and above deep gorges. When vehicles fall off the cliff, the people don’t only drown in the fast-moving rivers – they are swept across to the other side of the LoC. In most cases, it is buried wherever it lands. Families on the other side are not notified, or are notified too late, or find that returning a body requires routing it 4,000 kilometres around - from Baltistan to Islamabad, from Islamabad to Wagah and then to Ladakh, instead of the few kilometres across the actual border.
Ghulam Hussain, the man from Turtuk whose father met his brother in Mecca, had participated in a BBC documentary that brought this particular cruelty to light. He spoke about it with profound sorrow. The bodies are not returned. They become, as he put it, a spectacle - proof that the logic of state security has been extended even into death.
"We are treated as a commodity," said political and social activist Sajjad Kargili. "Not as human beings."
Pushed to the Margins
The political context around Thoud-Lukh matters as much as what was said inside it.
On the Indian side, Ladakh has been in sustained agitation since August 2019, when the government revoked Article 370 and bifurcated Jammu and Kashmir, creating Ladakh as a separate Union Territory without a legislature and placed under direct administration from New Delhi.
What many Ladakhis had initially welcomed as liberation from perceived Kashmiri political dominance turned, within a few years, into newer and more profound grievances. The Ladakhis gradually realised the proposition of colossal loss. Local councils lost authority. Land protections weakened. Unemployment among graduates rose to 26.5 percent.
In response to these challenges that pose an existential threat, the movement for statehood, for constitutional protections under the Sixth Schedule, for greater parliamentary representation, has brought together unprecedented solidarity between the Buddhist-majority Leh and Shia Muslim-majority Kargil through bodies known as the Leh Apex Body (LAB) and the Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA).
In September 2025, protests turned violent when security forces opened fire on a demonstration, killing four people. In a latest, the central government has agreed in principle to grant the region constitutional safeguards. Talks are still ongoing.
On the Pakistani side, the situation has different contours but a recognisable shape. Gilgit-Baltistan spent decades in constitutional ambiguity - severed from Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 1972 and given a new name – Northern Areas – a name that robbed the people of their identity. It was renamed Gilgit-Baltistan in 2009, but in much of mainland Pakistan’s imagination – the words ‘Northern Areas’ stick.
In the last several decades, the region has been governed by executive orders rather than constitutional law for most of its existence. More recently, ahead of assembly elections scheduled for June 2026, opposition political figures have been detained and expelled during campaign visits, with the territory's authorities requiring a no-objection certificate for entry that critics describe as a tool of political exclusion. Human rights observers have documented a pattern of suppression intensifying since 2024.
A speaker from Baltistan who spoke at the webinar was outspoken: "We don’t count anywhere. Our lives are political tools for others. Our division is artificial and it is celebrated. GB has become a political asset for Islamabad. And, we can’t discuss this. If we do, we are told, ‘it is anti-national’."
Differences But Dialogue
Not every speaker agreed. A businessman from Baltistan with family roots in Turtuk offered a different account, pointing to thousands of hotels in the region, brisk tourism, development, education. "I got help from the state for my education," he said, "as did many others." He spoke about the region getting more than its fair share of representation in the army, bureaucracy and judiciary,
Others pushed back. Pakistani dancer, social activist and PIPFPD member, in her concluding remarks, reminded about ‘lack of political representation’ which can’t make up for jobs and development. She also spoke about the targeting of Shia community within Pakistan which also impacts the people from Gilgit-Baltistan.
It was most eloquently put forward by Sajjad Hussain Kargili who said that development and democratic rights are not the same thing. "How good is development when our humanity is being throttled?"
"We are small in numbers," he said. "We are not a vote bank. We are not a voice. We live in the most peaceful region on earth and we yearn for peace. The way forward is not wars. Wars do not resolve anything. We, the people of Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan, cannot be sacrificed for the politics of two states."
“The way forward is dialogue,” he said, acknowledging that there are differences. There was no joint declaration on this. But everyone understood and agreed – the conversation, or Thoud-Lukh, must continue. They agreed, regardless of political view, regardless of which state they lived under, that the humanitarian situation demanded immediate attention, that divided families should be allowed to meet, that the dead should be allowed to come home. That people-to-people contact should be encouraged, not left to wither under visa regimes and security classifications.
It was Thoud-lukh. A mulaqat, a meeting – even though – online. But, no LoC could stop that.
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