Ladakh's former MP says the Home Ministry talks worked. Wangchuk disagrees

Thupstan Chhewang, the former Ladakh MP who once chaired the Leh Apex Body, told reporters in Leh on Saturday that the 9 September meeting with a Union Home Ministry sub-committee was fruitful. He said several points of consensus never reached the public, and that the delay sits inside the Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance, not in North Block. He asked the region's leadership not to return to the street.

Sonam Wangchuk, the educationist and Apex Body member, has described the same meeting as a disappointment that barely moved past 22 May. After the session he gave the government a week. If no written assurance arrived, a padyatra would start on 19 September and run to 24 September, with a wider agitation after that. The Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance issued a joint line that the talks produced nothing new.

Those two accounts of one room are now the political fact in Ladakh. Chief Secretary Ashish Kundra said a sui generis model is on the table: an elected Union Territory-level body under Article 371 with legislative, executive and financial powers, chosen by direct election from constituencies rather than through the hill councils. Chhewang said the meeting also discussed holding elections to the existing district councils before that UT body is formed. He said Wangchuk and parts of the KDA want the sequence reversed: the UT body first, council elections later.

Article 371 is not the Sixth Schedule. The Sixth Schedule is the demand that framed the 2025 protests. It would create autonomous district councils with a constitutional floor under tribal land and custom. Article 371 is a different shelf of the Constitution, used in other states to write special arrangements into the text without copying the Assam and Meghalaya model. Kundra's phrase sui generis is an admission that New Delhi does not intend to lift the Sixth Schedule as written and drop it onto Ladakh.

Chhewang resigned as Apex Body chairman in July 2025 after leading the campaign for statehood and Sixth Schedule protections. He sat in the 9 September room as a participant, not as chair. His Saturday briefing is the first senior voice from that room to say the meeting produced a mechanism, a power list and an electoral design. He also said the tribal character of the region requires nomination seats as well as elected ones.

Wangchuk was held under the National Security Act during the 2025 protests and released in February. He has said the 22 May meeting raised expectations that were never put on paper. His one-week clock, started after 9 September, expires this week. The date he has named for a walk, 19 September, is six days away.

Chhewang invoked 24 September 2025, the day buildings burned in Leh, and said the region should not walk back into that week. That sentence is a warning aimed at people who share his history in the Apex Body. It is also a public split. The former chair is asking the current campaign to accept an Article 371 body and council elections. The current face of the campaign is asking for a written Sixth Schedule-level assurance before any election calendar is set.

New Delhi can live with that split. A divided interlocutor is easier to wait out than a single list of demands. The cost of waiting is the calendar Wangchuk has published. If the padyatra starts on 19 September, the argument leaves the meeting room and returns to the road between Leh and the rest of the country.

The open question is sequencing. Council elections first, as Chhewang and parts of the Home Ministry describe, would put names on ballots before the new UT body exists. A UT body first, as Wangchuk wants, would write the powers before anyone stands. Both sides claim the 9 September room. Only one of those claims will still be standing on 19 September.