The Gujjar-Bakarwal tribe of Jammu and Kashmir are one of the largest transhumant tribal groups which traverse across the Himalayas along with their flock. A historically marginalised tribe, the Gujjar-Bakarwals have been considered to have occupied the peripheries of the nation-state both literally and metaphorically. As a result, claims regarding their marginalised status, including by this author in the past (Faridi 2020, 227-266), has been often linked to their hesitance in engaging with contemporary mainstream institutions of governance and production. While the Indian government has promoted policy tools that enable tribal groups to represent their interests and become collaborators in the policymaking process, the tribal response to the state policy of marketisation & globalisation is nebulous (Agrawal 2005). In this regard, there is a need to locate the extent of the ‘integration’ of tribes into the mainstream mode of production and the instruments affecting their agency.
In undertaking an exploratory analysis of the changing realities in this frontier region of the Himalayas, this chapter shall reveal the technologies and instruments employed to affect an expansion of the ‘modern’ state and market into the ‘traditional’ sites of production and social reproduction of the Gujjar-Bakarwal community. The thematic analysis shall direct the reader to the deployment of identity narratives in re-shaping communities and the use of technology to mould epistemes. Furthermore, the chapter shall analyse environmental and extractive governmentality during the Covid-19 pandemic in actuating dispossession and sedentarisation through criminalisation of a community — to catalyse a shift away from their transhumant natures. The chapter will act as a primer to examine tenancy rights and consequent political rights of the tribe against the encroaching privatised property hegemonic regime in Jammu and Kashmir.
