Militarized Panoramas: Defending the Paradox, Reversing Prejudice and Shifting the Imagined State in the Environmental Polemics of the Trans-Himalayan Frontiers.

Under modern dualism where nature is seen as external to society and ecological destruction is inherently intertwined with the idea of ‘saving’, therefore, while the Indian militaries stationed at the India-China border in the Changthang plain attempts to save the environment, this act itself is highly defended not so much for protecting the endemic Wild Ungulates but for the Indian state’s core need of possessing the militaries in the first place. Similarly, the ill founded conservation prejudices of the state that imposes the local grazing ban also conversely lend a space for the local pastoralists to liaison with the state-led military only to naturalize the military’s role in presiding over the local resource control in Changthang. By using the lens of cultural politics I want to bring attention to the complex dynamics that encourages and perpetuates the construction of militarized nature and cannot be understood through the simplistic and traditional representations of either state or society. The localized site with multiple actors impels one to tie the analysis in more complex ethnographic representations that are being constantly reproduced and challenged in the fertile terrain of Changthang. The specificities that emerge through this analytic only confirms that what is at stake in Changthang is not saving some pristine environment but building critical perspectives that focus on how social natures are transformed by which actors, for whose benefits with social and ecological impact and help broaden the framework that promises to take us beyond the problematic of adaptation in human-environmental relationships.