Muslims
Ladakhi Buddhists of the Zangskar Valley [journal article review]
The warfare and bitterness of the Indian partition era helped foster discrimination, dissention, and communal tensions that persist to this day in the Zangskar region of Ladakh, according to one scholar. Zangskar valley, which is 95 percent Buddhist, is in the mountains of Ladakh’s Kargil District to the southwest of the town of Leh and […]
Population Growth in Ladakh
A news story in the Telegraph of Calcutta last week observed that the demographic trends of Ladakh are running against the Buddhists. The article indicates that the population of 236,000 Ladakhis is divided, according to the 2001 census, into 47.4 percent Muslims and 45.9 percent Buddhists. The worrisome feature of the story—at least for the […]
Quran Desecration Provokes Violence in Ladakh
While the news has focused on worldwide protests against Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed, serious violence erupted last week in Ladakh over an act of vandalism that also angered Muslims. Accounts in the Indian press vary in some of the details, but on Sunday night, February 5, someone tore pages out of a […]
Religious Basis for Malaysian Discrimination against Orang Asli [anthology chapter review]
“When all Orang Asli have become Malays, then Malays will become Orang Asli,” one Semai man explained, getting right to the heart of a major problem for his society. In a recent article, Kirk Endicott and Robert Knox Dentan review many facets of the continuing Malaysian commitment to assimilating the Orang Asli societies—the Semai, the […]
Violence Threatens the Peaceful Societies of North India, Part 3: The Roots of Conflict in Ladakh [book review]
To the unsophisticated outsider, the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has been about religion, territory and fervent nationalism. But conflicts in the region, especially in the Ladakh districts of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir, are far more complex than that. The political struggles in the region tend to aggravate already-existing conflicts […]
