COMMUNITY RIGHTS AND STATUTORY LAWS: POLITICS OF FOREST USE IN UTTRAKHAND HIMALAYAS

Forests are all gone now. There used to be thick growth of Sal and Oak when I came to this village as a young bride. I am seventy years now. In fifty years I have seen everything change. I see more guards and officials now rather than trees. The government is there not to improve our condition but to win elections. (Rukmini Devi, Bhansali village, Nainital) In many parts of Uttranchal, the newly created hill state of India, one finds numerous accounts like Rukmini Devi’s. For the rural pahari1 community the formation of this new political entity is yet to make a substantive difference to their everyday lives and to the state of forests around them. In fact many of them enumerate incidences of conflict that the villagers have had with the state while asserting their customary claim on forest resources. Few lament that, once a composite entity, the forest is now being fragmented and has been demarcated into diverse property regime types such as reserved and village ( panchayat forests. The existence of multiple property regimes and conflicting rules and regulations has made the relationship between the people, state and forest a contested domain. Given the above context, the present paper aims to highlight the dominance of statutory laws over local self-governing institutions and how community space is 1 The term pahari implies hill people