States » NorthPosted at: Oct 24 2026 1:22PM


Wangchuk, wife hit back at Ladakh administration over HIAL land lease row

Srinagar, Oct 24 (UNI) Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk and his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, have accused the Ladakh administration of targeting the Himalayan Institute of Alternative Learning (HIAL) over a land lease dispute, alleging that officials are blaming the institute for delays caused by the administration itself.
The allegation follows an affidavit in the High Court that questions the institute’s claim to its land in Leh.
The affidavit was filed on Wednesday in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh while responding to a writ petition by the HIAL, which challenged an August 21, 2025 order cancelling the land lease allotted to it
The administration told the court that HIAL is occupying government land in Leh without paying dues. It argued that the allotment “automatically lapsed” in 2019 and that Wangchuk’s “stature and accolades” cannot give the institute legal rights over the land.
Wangchuk, who is a member of the Leh Apex Body (LAB), one of the groups leading the demand for constitutional safeguards and holding talks with the Centre, on Saturday said that whenever he raises his voice on injustices in Ladakh, the “government media machinery” targets him and HIAL’s land lease.
“Please take the message, don’t kill the messenger,” he wrote. “A quick look at this letter shows their own delays if not incompetence. In all, 5 written appeals, 15 visits & 30 calls were made appealing for timely execution of land lease.”
Wangchuk’s wife Angmo went further, posting a detailed timeline and calling the administration’s stand “a spectacle of bureaucratic dishonesty and incompetence.”
“The @Ladakh administration has the audacity to tell the High Court and the national media that HIAL failed to execute its land lease. Really? Then perhaps they should first read their own letters before making a public spectacle of themselves,’ she said on X.
According to her, HIAL applied for the lease on May 20, 2018, barely 15 days after the land was allotted. When it wrote again in March 2020, the administration replied that the lease could not be executed because it had not finalised its lease policy. In February 2021, she said, the administration repeated that explanation, admitted the delay affected other institutions as well, and explicitly allowed HIAL to continue construction. HIAL wrote again in July 2023.
“Four dates. Written correspondence. Official signatures and stamps. Their own admissions,” she wrote.
“What kind of administration creates the obstacle, sits on it for years, and then blames the institution that has been pleading with it to remove that very obstacle?” Angmo asked.
“This is abysmal governance. A bureaucratic absurdity elevated to an art form. And what makes it worse is the spectacle of these allegations being circulated through the national media while the matter is sub judice. Is the purpose to assist the Court in establishing the truth, or to destroy an institution's reputation before the facts have even been examined?,” she asked.
She said HIAL has spent years trying to build an institution that addresses the real challenges of the Himalayas, only to be buried “beneath paperwork, contradictions and public accusations.”
She put one question to the administration: why did it repeatedly tell HIAL the lease could not be executed because its own policy was not ready?
“Ladakh needs statesmen. Instead, we seem to have acquired petty shopkeepers of power, keeping accounts of imagined offences while remaining conveniently oblivious to their own failures,” she wrote.
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Tags: #Wangchuk# wife hit back at Ladakh administration over HIAL land lease row
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