Reasi: Perched high on a gulf in the high Himalayas, the newly constructed bridge will soon help India deal with disputed control of Kashmir and the growing strategic threat from China.
The Chenab Rail Bridge, the tallest of its kind in the world, has been hailed as an engineering feat connecting the rugged Kashmir valley to the vast Indian plains for the first time by rail.
But its closure has raised concerns among some in the region, which has a long history of opposition to Indian rule with a permanent garrison of more than 500,000 soldiers.
The Indian Army has said that the strategic advantage of the bridge in New Delhi cannot be understated.
“The train to Kashmir will be decisive in times of peace and war,” 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 a war over it.
Rebel groups have also waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence or merger with Pakistan.
The new bridge will “facilitate the movement of army personnel to and from a larger number than was possible earlier,” said Noor Ahmed Baba, a politics professor at the Central University of Kashmir.
But, along with soldiers, the bridge will “facilitate the movement” of ordinary people and goods, he told AFP.
This has created resentment among some people in Kashmir who believe that easier access will increase the number of outsiders coming to buy land and settle.
Earlier, strict rules on land ownership were lifted after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-nationalist government revoked Kashmir's partial autonomy in 2019.
“If its aim is to destroy the Kashmiri consciousness of linguistic, cultural and intellectual identity or to demonstrate muscular nationalism, the effect will be negative,” historian Siddique Wahid told AFP.
Indian Railways has called the $24 million bridge “the biggest civil engineering challenge faced by any railway project in India in recent history”.
This is expected to boost economic development and trade, reduce the cost of goods.
But retired General Hooda said the most important result of the bridge would be to revolutionize logistics in Ladakh, the icy region bordering China.
India and China, the world's two most populous nations, are fierce rivals vying for strategic influence in South Asia, and their 3,500-kilometer (2,200-mile) shared border has been a perennial source of tension.
Their forces clashed in 2020, killing at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, and armies from both sides today face off in contested high-altitude border areas.
Hooda told AFP, “Military equipment from needles to large … must be transported by all roads and stored before the roads are closed in Ladakh for the winter for six months every year.”
Now all that can be transported by rail, in what Indian military experts call “the world's largest military logistics exercise” – supplying Ladakh through snowbound passes.
The project will complement several other road tunnel projects connecting Kashmir and Ladakh, not far from India's borders with China and Pakistan.
A 1,315m long steel and concrete bridge connects the two hills with an arch 359m above the chilly waters of the Chenab River.
The trains are ready to run and just await the expected ribbon cutting by Modi.
The 272 km railway starts from the garrison town of Udhampur, the headquarters of the Army's Northern Command, and passes through Srinagar, the regional capital.
It ends at a height of one kilometer in the gateway trade town of Baramulla near the Line of Control with Pakistan.
When the road is open, it is twice as far and takes a day to drive.
The railway has an estimated cost of $3.9 billion and has been a mammoth undertaking since construction began nearly three decades ago.
While many road and pipeline bridges are taller, the Guinness World Records confirmed that the Chenab has surpassed the previous tallest railway bridge, the Najihe Bridge in China.
Describing India's new bridge as a “miracle”, its deputy chief designer RR Mallick said, “This design and construction experience has become a holy book for our engineers.”
