The fiction of disaster: Forest fires and state-making in the Indian Himalaya

Recurrent disasters such as wildfires are increasingly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but this broad explanation often obscures the political choices that shape how disasters are recognised, governed, and instrumentalised. Focusing on the Uttarakhand Himalaya in India, where forest fires have become a near-annual phenomenon, this article examines how disaster management is deeply entangled with state-making practices in political forests. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, and media articles, it highlights how the 2016 Uttarakhand fires marked a turning point in the formal inclusion of forest fires within India's disaster policy. Since then, the spectacle of fire, amplified through media coverage, remote sensing technologies, and smoke spreading to distant urban centres, has helped normalise the framing of fire as a disaster. This spectacle is often disconnected from the social and ecological realities of fire in the region. It also enables the Uttarakhand Forest Department to access emergency resources, distribute blame and responsibility, and consolidate territorial control. Yet rather than reducing fire risk, disaster management interventions reinforce a suppression-oriented approach and lock the region into a firefighting trap. The study argues that disaster management in Uttarakhand is not simply a response to environmental crisis, but a political project that governs through crisis, produces risk, and deepens the state's authority over forests. It suggests that managing wildfires as disasters can, in certain contexts, serve as a renewed site of state-making in political forests, complicating accounts of state retreat advanced in scholarship on green neoliberalism and disaster capitalism.