New Delhi: Decrying her husband’s “illegal detention” and the “witch-hunt” she said he has been subjected to over the last four years, entrepreneur Gitanjali Angmo on Wednesday (October 1) wrote to President Droupadi Murmu demanding Sonam Wangchuk’s unconditional release.Although the police officers who transported Wangchuk, currently held in Jodhpur under the draconian National Security Act, said they would put her on the phone with him after they landed in Rajasthan, she was yet to receive that call five days after his detention, Angmo said in her representation to the president.“I am completely unaware about my husband’s condition. I was also told the officer would explain to me my legal rights. Even that has not been done till today. I am shocked and devastated,” she wrote.Angmo also said that she along with a number of students and staffers of the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh she co-founded with Wangchuk have been placed under surveillance.“Two members of the Institute were taken into police custody over the past three days, presumably without any authority of law,” she said.A security guard of the institute on Tuesday also received a letter seeking a list of fellows, staffers, teachers and trainers working there along with details of their parentage and residence as well as “latest photographs”, per her letter.“A full-scale witch hunt has been unleashed for the past one month in particular, and for the past four years covertly, to kill the spirit of my husband and all the causes he stands for and espouses,” wrote Angmo, who described Wangchuk as a “peaceful Gandhian protestor with an impeccable track record of service to the nation”.Wangchuk, she added, “has always stood for the solidarity of India”, “the strengthening of our borders” and “the integration of its peripheral regions through a strong democratic mechanism” involving statehood or Union territory-with-legislature status for Ladakh in addition to special protections under the Constitution’s sixth schedule.“Apart from the illegal detention of my husband, the manner in which the State and its agencies are hounding us and have kept us under surveillance is deplorable,” said Angmo, contending that the authorities’ actions had denied them their fundamental right to legal representation.“Your Excellency, we appeal to your wisdom and good sense as the head of the state to intervene and inject [a] voice of sanity in an otherwise chaotic state of affairs,” she continued, adding to ask for Wangchuk’s “unconditional release”.Wangchuk was detained as the Ladakh administration blamed him for violence that broke out in Leh during protests and a hunger strike he had been leading demanding special constitutional protections for Ladakh.Four civilians were killed in clashes between protesters and security personnel, while some 90 other demonstrators as well as 35 police and paramilitary officers were injured.Angmo has denied the allegation that Wangchuk was responsible for the violence. She has also opposed allegations of financial impropriety levelled by the government against their NGOs.