REASI: A newly completed bridge that soars high across a gorge in the mountainous Himalayas will soon help India consolidate its control over disputed Kashmir and counter the growing strategic threat from China.
The Chenab Railway Bridge, the tallest of its kind in the world, has been hailed as an engineering feat, linking the troubled valley of Kashmir with the vast Indian plains by train for the first time.
But its completion has alarmed some in a territory with a long history of resistance to Indian rule, which already has a permanent garrison of more than 500,000 soldiers.
India's military leadership says that the strategic advantages of the bridge in New Delhi cannot be underestimated.
“The train to Kashmir will be important in both peacetime and wartime,” General Dipendra Singh Hooda, retired former chief of India's northern military command, told AFP.
Muslim-majority Kashmir is at the center of a bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan, divided between them since independence from British rule in 1947, and the nuclear-armed neighbors have fought wars over it.
Rebel groups have also waged a 35-year insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan.
The new bridge will “facilitate the movement of army personnel coming and going in larger numbers than was possible before,” said Noor Ahmad Baba, a professor of politics at the Central University of Kashmir.
But like the soldier, the bridge will “facilitate the movement” of ordinary people and goods, he told AFP.
That has raised concerns among some in Kashmir, who believe easier access will lead to a surge of outsiders coming to buy land and settle.
Earlier strict land ownership rules were lifted after the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir's partial autonomy in 2019.
“If the intention is to suppress the Kashmiri consciousness of its linguistic, cultural and intellectual identity or to flaunt a strong nationalism, then the impact will be negative,” historian Siddique Waheed told AFP.
Indian Railways is calling the $24 million bridge “perhaps the biggest civil engineering challenge faced by any railway project in India in recent history”.
This is expected to promote economic development and trade by reducing the cost of moving goods.
But Hooda, a retired general, said the most important impact of the bridge would be a revolution in logistics in Ladakh, the icy region that borders China.
India and China, the world's two most populous nations, are bitter rivals vying for strategic influence in South Asia, and their shared 3,500-kilometer (2,200-mile) border has been a perennial source of tension.
Their forces clashed in 2020, killing at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, and forces from both sides today clash across the disputed high-altitude border areas.
“Everything from a needle to the largest military equipment… has to be shipped by road and stored in Ladakh for six months every year before the roads close for the winter,” Hooda told AFP.
All of this can now be transported by train, facilitating what Indian military experts call “the world's largest military logistics exercise” — securing Ladakh through the snow-covered passes.
The project will support several other road tunnel projects connecting Kashmir and Ladakh, not far from India's borders with China and Pakistan.
The 1,315-meter-long steel-concrete bridge connects the two mountains with an arch at a height of 359 meters above the cool waters of the Chenab River.
The trains are ready to run and are only waiting for the expected ribbon cutting by Modi.
The 272-km railway begins in the garrison town of Udhampur, the headquarters of the Army's Northern Command, and passes through the regional capital Srinagar.
It ends a kilometer higher in Baramulla, a trading gateway town near the Line of Control with Pakistan.
When the road is open, it is double the distance and takes a day's drive.
The railroad cost about $3.9 billion and was a huge undertaking, with construction beginning nearly three decades ago.
Although several road and pipeline bridges are taller, the Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed that the Chenab surpasses the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe Bridge in China.
Describing India's new bridge as a “miracle”, its deputy chief designer RR Malik said the experience of its design and construction “has become a holy book for our engineers”.
