With China to the east and Pakistan to the west, the Himalayan region of Ladakh is critical to India’s national security and has been under tight central government control since 2019, to the frustration of many of its residents.
On Wednesday, their anger spilled over into deadly protests after two hunger strikers were hospitalized, and those demanding statehood for the territory clashed with the police in Leh, the region’s biggest city.
Protesters also set fire to the local office of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political party of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, according to leaders of Ladakh’s movement for statehood.
India’s Ministry of Home Affairs said the office of a political party had been set on fire but did not name it. In a statement, the government said that more than 30 members of the police and security forces had been injured, and that the police had fired in self-defense, resulting in “some casualties,” although it did not specify how many.
Chering Dorjay, a co-chairman of Leh Apex Body, the main group fighting for Ladakh’s autonomy, said five protesters had died and at least 70 had been injured.
The lieutenant governor of Ladakh, Kavinder Gupta, said that those who compared the protest movement to the recent youth uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal were responsible for the violence.
“If this would not have been stopped today, they would have tried to destroy the whole Leh,” he said in a video statement.
For the past two weeks, the movement’s supporters had been on a hunger strike led by Sonam Wangchuk, a climate activist who has become the face of Ladakh’s fight for autonomy. He fasted for the entire period with a small group of supporters, while hundreds of others joined for daily fasts.
On Tuesday, two of the hunger strikers were rushed to the hospital as their health deteriorated. The episode set off some members of the movement’s youth wing, who pelted stones and damaged buildings on Wednesday morning, Mr. Dorjay said.
“We tried hard to control them but they just became uncontrollable,” he said.
The Indian government, in its statement, blamed Mr. Wangchuk for inciting the violence, saying that he had made provocative statements that included mentions of the Arab Spring movement and of the anti-corruption protests that broke out in Nepal earlier this month.
Mr. Wangchuk said in a social media post that he did not support violence, and called the unrest a setback to Ladakh’s movement for statehood.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wangchuk called off his hunger strike.
Mr. Wangchuk has long used hunger strikes as a way to pressure the Indian government to negotiate. Last year, he and a group of supporters trekked about 500 miles from Leh to New Delhi, India’s capital, with the aim of fasting until the government agreed to restart talks with representatives of the movement. (The latest round is scheduled for Oct. 6.)
Ladakh was once part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought several wars over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, which both countries claim, including, in 1999, in Kargil, part of Ladakh’s territory.
In 2019, the Modi government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous status, including the ability for Kashmir to set its own laws. The move allowed Jammu and Kashmir to elect its own local assembly, but broughtLadakh under New Delhi’s direct rule.
Ladakh’s geostrategic importance has grown since then. In 2020, India and China were locked in deadly border skirmishes in the Galwan Valley of Ladakh.