Uri/Muzaffarabad, Feb. 11 (Reuters): On a chilly night in late October 1947, thousands of heavily armed Pakistani invaders swept along Kashmir’s main highway, its lifeline to the outside world.

Indian troops eventually forced the tribesmen back down the narrow road to just beyond Uri, a trading post high in the snow-capped Pir Pinjals, leaving Pakistan with a third of Jammu and Kashmir.

The highway, which once united the Himalayan region, has been closed for traffic ever since, a powerful, emotional symbol of the divided homeland of Kashmiris and their divided families.

“This was a very important road before 1947,” says 40-year-old lecturer A.H. Mughal, as Indian soldiers search his car at a checkpoint. “Now, this is a road to nowhere.”

But as India and Pakistan work to improve ties and find a peaceful answer to Kashmir, Kashmiris on both sides of the heavily militarised ceasefire line, from tea sellers to leading politicians, are increasingly optimistic the highway will reopen.

Officials from the two nations are to meet in Islamabad next week to discuss a range of bilateral disputes, including Kashmir, and a possible bus service along the highway linking Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the main cities of Indian and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

“It will be a very important step. It’s a tremendous emotional factor for people — we have always felt divided,” says Noor Ahmed Baba, head of political science at Srinagar’s Kashmir University. “It has a political logic, it has an emotional logic and it has an economic logic.”

For Kashmiris, a bus service heralding a softer frontier would be the most promising sign yet that there might one day be an end to the bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands since 1947.

“I dream that I will be on the first bus,” says Ashraf, 37, who fled to PoK in 1990 at the height of a bloody anti-Indian revolt when he was accused of supporting the rebels.

“I will ride on the top. I will start waving to everyone as soon as I cross over. I am dreaming of how beautiful that day will be. I will hug and kiss my mother, and feel her warm arms around me. To be with my family — I will be the luckiest person in the world. I will get down and kiss the soil.”

Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, says freer travel would break down barriers and help open people’s eyes to conditions on each side. “People should be allowed to see for themselves,” she says. “There are many wrong impressions about this place.”

Many see big gains, too, for the Kashmir Valley’s rich agricultural trade — from apples to saffron, silk to dried fruit and handicrafts — long dragged down by war and hostility. Speculators are already buying up land along the highway, which follows the Jhelum for 185 km from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad, eventually leading on to Islamabad.

The Pakistani capital is four times closer to Srinagar than Delhi — a crucial advantage for farmers who need to get their produce to market quickly because the Valley has no cold storage.

“This road is a lifeline for our business,” says Abdul Majid Lone, an ebullient 52-year-old teashop owner in Uri, who plans to build a modest guesthouse if the road reopens. “People pray to God it will go ahead.”

But among the sensitive hurdles yet to be cleared is just how to deal with the frontier formalities: India wants passports and visas — effectively recognising the ceasefire line as the border; Pakistan and most Kashmiris want a less formal process.

“It is our land,” says Batool Atta, a university lecturer in PoK. “It looks very odd to visit our own area with passports and to be running after visas.”

Prone to landslides and badly potholed, the road — de-mined each morning — follows the Jhelum through the mountains, winding past riverside artillery emplacements and ugly army posts with empty bottles hung on razor wire as makeshift alarms.

After almost six decades of war, rebellion and hostility in which almost every family has suffered, reopening the highway could only be a first, if emotional, step in healing Kashmir.