Wangchuk, a celebrated innovator, inspired a Bollywood megahit. Arrested in late September, he is now being accused of plotting an Arab Spring-like revolt.

New Delhi, India — On the night of August 5, 2019, hundreds of Kashmiris were arrested amid a crackdown by Indian security forces that followed the Indian government’s decision to strip the region of its special rights and status as a state.

Sonam Wangchuk celebrated and thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“THANK YOU PRIME MINISTER,” he wrote on X, then Twitter, “for fulfilling Ladakh’s longstanding dream.”

One of India’s best-known innovators and education reformers, Wangchuk was referring to a decades-long demand from many in Ladakh for the cold desert bordering China to be separated from Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-administered part of the disputed region that Pakistan also claims. Until August 2019, Ladakh was part of the former Jammu and Kashmir state. With the Modi government’s move, it was made a separate administrative entity, known as a union territory in the country, to be governed federally by New Delhi.

However, while the rest of Jammu and Kashmir — also reduced to a union territory from the state — was allowed to keep a locally elected legislature, Ladakh was not. That lack of any say over their future would slowly turn the peaceful Ladakh into a tinderbox of political unrest against Modi’s government in the subsequent six years. And leading that protest movement is a disillusioned Wangchuk.

On September 26, Wangchuk was arrested and transported about 1,600km (1,000 miles) from home to jail in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, charged with “anti-national” activities, conspiring to overthrow the government, after a breakaway group from his protest engaged in violent clashes with security forces. Indian paramilitary soldiers shot dead four protesters after they had set the local office of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on fire, and authorities accused Wangchuk of instigating the violence.

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The same party and its government had previously turned to Wangchuk for promotional campaigns in Ladakh. BJP-led governments in other states had sought his advice as an educationist.