Last week, when Ladakh erupted in violence and four people got shot down by security forces, police and other officials started blaming Sonam Wangchuk for inciting the protests, describing him as an anti-national, saying further that they were also investigating “his visit to Pakistan in February” this year, as if that was a crime against India by itself. I know about that visit only too well. He was an invitee to a conference organised by Dawn group, one of Pakistan’s leading media houses. The conference was about tackling climate change. I know about it because I was invited to it as well.That’s actually where I met Sonam Wangchuk for the first time – in Islamabad, in the first week of February this year. Dawn had embarked on an ambitious South Asian project to draw awareness to climate change. It is planning to continue the conversation in another conference next year. The media group pulled together people from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and India, making the case that climate change was a challenge that needed an “all of South Asia” approach. After all, the countries in the region are all joined by mountains to the north, rivers and river systems flowing east and west, and coastlines and seas further down. The floods that devastated Punjab caused widespread destruction in the Punjab province of Pakistan too.I recall thinking all the time during the two-day conference that this is what the South Asian Association for Region Co-operation (SAARC) might have devoted itself to quite usefully, had it not been so uselessly defunct. After India’s refusal to attend the Islamabad summit in 2016 over the Uri attack, SAARC has died in Delhi’s eyes. BIMSTEC became India’s most favoured go-to alternate regional grouping, but Delhi’s interest in this group too has waned. Now India has no real friends in the neighbourhood. But that’s another story.Back in Islamabad, ‘Breathe Pakistan’, was the title of the conference. Dawn’s publisher Haroon Hameed, who has a fund of interesting stories about his road journeys in India back in the day when this was possible, was the moving force behind it. The venue was the renovated Jinnah Convention Center, where the SAARC summit would have been held had it taken place, up a small hill past the Diplomatic Enclave. When I was posted in Pakistan as the correspondent of The Hindu, I heard Karen Armstrong speak at the convention centre on the topic ‘Tolerance and Islam’. That was in February 2008 when Pakistan was grappling with a string of deadly terrorist attacks by the then newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.Wangchuk was in a panel titled ‘Glacial Melt: A Sustainable Strategy for the Water Towers of South Asia’, where he spoke about the Ice Towers that he helped construct in Ladakh. His panel was chaired by the UN co-ordinator in Afghanistan, Indrika Ratwatte.During his presentation, Wangchuk explained the “ice stupa” concept as the creation of artificial glaciers in the winter, which would melt and provide water in the summer. “Freeze, freeze, and freeze,” he said, and those are three words I noted down from his speech. I also recall clearly that he showered praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his visionary leadership for tackling climate change.What actually surprised me most was that no one seemed to know who Sonam Wangchuk was. When the panel discussion began, I was seated next to the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in the audience. Wangchuk’s formal introduction at the panel contained no hint of his political activism or his hunger strikes. He was introduced as a climate change activist and innovator from Ladakh. So I asked Hamid if he had heard of Wangchuk before. When he replied in the negative, I asked him if he had seen the Aamir Khan film 3 Idiots. He had, and I told him the story, apocryphal or not, that the character played by Khan in the movie was based on him. I also told him about his foot march in 2024 from Leh to Delhi, for Ladakh’s statehood and other rights.Ever the newsman, Hamid stood up like a shot, went up close to the dais and began taking photos of Wangchuk. He may have alerted his TV channel as well, for soon after the panel discussion, Wangchuk was surrounded by crews asking him for a “byte”. Before that, the only people who seemed to know of him were a group of youth from Gilgit Baltistan. Wangchuk asked me to take a photo of him with the group. I asked them who they were, and Wangchuk replied: “They are my brothers from the other side”. They all posed in an awkward semi circle next to the stage, with Wangchuk in the middle.At a get-together after the conference I asked a senior person in Dawn why they had not given Sonam a full spectrum introduction. He laughed and said: “There was no need. This was a climate conference, saying all that would have shifted the focus”.Over the last few days, as I thought back on that two-day trip to Islamabad and tried to reconcile it with the accusations about Wangchuk the “anti-national”, I also thought about a government that has strung Ladakhis along for over five years on their demand for more agency over their own lives – Sixth Schedule, statehood, demographic protection, rights over their land, the right to representation.When a five-year long protest turned violent, and the security forces responded with what seems like disproportionate force, and four people were killed in a place that has remained peaceful, it was easy to shift the blame on “Wangchuk, who went to Pakistan”. Officials accused him of inciting protestors by talking about the Arab Spring and Gen Z protests in Nepal. Did no one think of cautioning him when he actually made those speeches, or did the Centre just fail to see that it had turned a peaceful little town into a festering site of people’s grievances and unfulfilled aspirations that was just waiting to burst?It truly takes a special sort of genius to turn friends into adversaries. Ladakh, which celebrated the reading down of Article 370, its freedom from Jammu and Kashmir and its own status as a brand new Union Territory, on August 5, 2019, has turned a full 180 degrees. Full marks to the government for this.Nirupama Subramanian is a veteran journalist.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.