Amid India-China border dispute, nations co-operate on telescopes

For the past decade, even when battles waged below, both nations have leveraged their clear skies for ‘astro-diplomacy’, forging international ties and boosting their scientific standing

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The observatory in Hanle, Ladakh. Photo: Dorje Angchuk

Raghu Karnad andAnmol Tikoo

Published: 7:15pm, 23 Oct 2020Updated: 11:06am, 26 Oct 2020

In June, when India and China had their deadliest military encounter in 50 years, the only weapons used were blades, rocks and spiked clubs. The troops, who were forbidden from using firearms, were making an attempt at “mutual disengagement” in the Galwan Valley, a remote outpost in the region of Ladakh, the northernmost part of India. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the Stone Age melee, with an unknown number of Chinese casualties. Most of the Indian casualties had been pushed down a river gorge into icy water and died awaiting evacuation.

Ladakh is one of the most elevated areas on Earth, part of a region often called “the roof of the world”. Despite the perils that one might face there – altitude sickness, bitter cold and narrow roads prone to landslides – it is a place to behold. The slopes, a tie-dye of mineral hues, enclose iridescent, glacier-fed lakes. Overhead are some of the world’s clearest skies, spotless by day and crowded with stars by night. For centuries, the region was a crossroads for trading caravans and travellers from across Asia.

Today, the area is divided between India and its rival nuclear powers, China and Pakistan, each of which is accused of annexing territories there: Kashmir, Aksai Chin, Gilgit-Baltistan and Tibet. Even in less tense times, Indian and Chinese troops stare each other down across the disputed border, known as the Line of Actual Control, or LAC, in carefully choreographed encounters.

In May, before the battle at Galwan, rival patrols came to blows on the northern shores of Pangong Tso, the largest of Ladakh’s glacial lakes; a video of the incident went viral, showing men brawling against stark inclines. By the end of August, the skirmishes had moved to the lake’s southern shore. These landscapes, rendered digitally in Indian news coverage, seemed bare of natural or human life, and void of any purpose but as border, buffer or battlefield.

A still captured on Weibo shows Indian and Chinese troops clashing on the disputed border. Photo: Weibo

On the southern shore of Pangong Tso, however, lies a group of pale structures that are focused not on the ground but the sky. At their centre is an aluminium shed built over a modest solar telescope. Throughout the recent skirmishes and during India’s months-long Covid-19 lockdown, this telescope has remained busy tracking solar flares.