With the increasing establishment of roads and residential areas in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the region’s pastoralists -- mainly Gujjar and Bakkarwals (G&B) herders -- were pushed into migrating through dangerous and congested roads and tunnels with traffic and nervous tension, because of which the G&B incurred heavy losses. The navigation through bottlenecks ends up in many accidents, resulting in the deaths of their animals, and loss of lives and limbs of some G&B. They must also tolerate abuse from passing vehicles and the traffic police and forest authorities, who have increasingly viewed their migration as an indulgence. The fencing off of forest land, and the growing number of settlements is squeezing the G&B from both sides. Thus, the recent move to provisioning for the safe passage of pastoralists from winter to summer areas by the government has engendered relief in the community.
These new initiatives targeted at the G&B owe much to the leadership of Shahid Iqbal Choudhary the Administrative Secretary of Tribal Affairs Department, J&K. Unlike previous Secretaries, Shahid is himself a G&B and has knowledge of what his community needs to conduct their livelihood with a modicum of peace and dignity. In a sense, he has been the proverbial bridge between the administration and the community, connecting two rather disconnected, disparate worlds into a somewhat precarious yet fordable path.
I discuss why this passage is a precarious one, given the nomad-state opposition in literature. And how the passage may be buttressed to generate greater security despite the given opposition. What ensues is an analysis of what such changes may do to the identity of the bureaucratic state -- perpetually in a drive to modernize, homogenise and systematize; and what ramifications such initiatives, regulating nomadic movement, might have on the temporality and sense of self of the G&B.
