Jammu and Kashmir: The Railway Story
Asia News Agency
Decades ago, in pre-independence days, engineers of Forbes, Forbes, Campbell & Co. of Karachi proposed to the then Maharaja Pratap Singh of Kashmir, a 150-kilometre ropeway to haul timber and iron, live animals, fruits, and vegetables. Linked to a railway line running from Srinagar to Shahabad in south Kashmir’s Dooru, the project would connect Kashmir’s agrarian markets to the industrial powerhouses of India.
That dream, writes Praveen Swami (contributing editor at ThePrint) was realised two weeks ago when the first train linking Katra with Srinagar traversed the Chenab Bridge, hanging 359 metres over raging waters below—the result of seventeen years of work—and then headed through the brand-new Banihal Tunnel. Train lines, roads, tunnels and rivers “can all be transformed through technology to build new relationships between peoples and economies.”
From 1921 onward, Maharaja Pratap Singh, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his successors HD Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh “all contributed to the transformation of the geographic relationship Kashmir has with the rest of India—culminating in the triumph that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now presided over.”
The evolution of connectivity
For most of the nineteenth century, the fastest way from Srinagar to Delhi was a rutted cart road over the Banihal Pass. A number of ambitious railway projects were brought to the table, as Swami puts it, in the late nineteenth century, but without success. For the most part, passengers and goods from the Kashmir Valley used terrible roads through the mountains linking Srinagar with the mainland.
This was so, historian Parvez Ahmed writes as through earlier centuries, Kashmir’s trade relations focussed on markets in Central Asia, such as Samarkand, Kashgar, Bukhara, Khurasan and Yarkand. The Mughal invasion of 1586 led to the formation of linkages between Kashmiri traders and markets in the plains of Punjab and beyond. The brief period of Afghan rule, from 1753 to 1819, saw this trade collapse. However, the rise of the Dogra monarchy in 1819 led to further evolution in trade with the plains.
But, writes Swami “the expansion of road and rail projects needed money, and the monarchy didn’t have it….From the 1930s, the economist and political activist Prithvi Nath Dhar—later to head Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s secretariat—had begun to think through what Kashmir’s accession to India might look like. The one possible rail line, he wrote in a 1951 note, would have been through Banihal, as the Forbes, Forbes, Campbell & Co. report had made clear.” Thus, ‘if Kashmir develops her railway communications, a much closer integration with India will be possible, and her comparative isolation, brought about by the high mountain ranges of the Himalayas, broken.’
The new train will bring Kashmir just a little closer
For Dhar, it seemed that the agricultural economy of Kashmir and the industrial economy of India complemented each other perfectly. Much of what Kashmir needed was just being routed through Punjab, not made there. Linking Kashmir to the broader Indian market would yield substantial profits for its farmers. All that was needed was a secure logistical system. Kashmir had to be related to India with iron and concrete, not soldiers and bullets.
Kashmir’s railway story, writes Swami “reveals essential aspects of what India has achieved in the state, which often receives insufficient attention….The war India really needs to win is to make Kashmir’s people secure, prosperous partners in the project of India. To this end, each journey on the new train will bring us just a little closer.”
Chenab bridge, a civilisational message: Kashmiris need more than just infrastructure
The Chenab Bridge, writes Amitabh Mattoo (served as a cabinet-level advisor to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed; professor and dean of the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and honorary professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia) “is not just a rail link. It is a civilisational message. That we will connect where others divide. That we will include where others exclude. That we will invest where others instigate. It is a span of steel, but also of sovereignty and solidarity…..”
Unprecedented investment: While responding firmly to terror, PM Modi’s government has “also poured unprecedented investment into the region’s long-neglected civic infrastructure. In just a few years, thousands of kilometres of rural roads have been built. Electricity has reached villages long resigned to kerosene. Schools and health centres have seen real, visible upgrades. Tourism, once in freefall, was, before Pahalgam happened, witnessing an unprecedented revival.
“The Chenab Bridge crystallises this vision. A structure that was once dismissed as impossible is now not only real, it is operational. That is not just governance. It is political will translated into steel. This marks a break from the era of token gestures and annual visits. Development is no longer an addendum to security — it is a strategy in itself. The goal is not just to pacify, but to empower. Not just to integrate, but to inspire. In Kashmir, that change matters. Because promises have been made before. What is different now is execution and expectation.”
But only trust can bind people: Still, emphasises Mattoo, “let us not deceive ourselves. Steel can bind mountains, but only trust can bind people. What Kashmir needs is not just infrastructure. It needs empathy. It needs restoration. It needs a political imagination that moves from managing resentment to enabling partnership. From surveillance to self-worth. From control to confidence.”
