Paper short abstract:

Due to its unclear constitutional status, Pakistan’s region Gilgit-Baltistan has been experiencing the country’s extreme inflation through price hikes imposed by federal bureaucrats. In response, everyday acts of price mediation and refusal emerged, alongside a political critique from the periphery.

Paper long abstract:

The high inflation-rate and currency-devaluation that has been taking place in Pakistan especially over the last two years is experienced in a distinct way in the country’s North. Gilgit-Baltistan, the Pakistani part of Kashmir, is not fully recognised as a province and hence administered by the federal government while its population has no right to vote for the national-parliament. Its food and energy prices are to a large extent regulated by the federal government. In the extreme inflation disrupting livelihoods since spring 2022, most inhabitants are therefore blaming a government that they cannot even vote for. However, the impact of inflation on everyday-life in Gilgit-Baltistan also generates what I will call ‘political critique from the periphery’ that carries the potential for unexpected coalitions and shared political subjectivities – enacted through large-scale protests, social-media debates, cooperative-banking, and refusals to adapt one’s prices to a not self-inflicted crisis.

Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a small-town in Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, during the country’s constitutional and economic crisis in 2022-23, the paper investigates how people relate everyday negotiations about tea prices and essential foodstuffs to macro-structural discussions around potential IMF-bailouts, loans by the Chinese state, and the spectre of national-default. It argues that against the backdrop of the history of this marginalised yet treasured region (Ali 2019), the soaring inflation reproduces centre-periphery dynamics, while it also increases political consciousness and claims towards more independence of the Pakistani federal-state.

Ali, Nosheen. 2019. “Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern-Frontier”. Cambridge-Univ-Press.