If the ancient world had its seven wonders, the Kashmir rail link offers its own — in feats of not just engineering but of the endurance of political will. Or, perhaps, the lack of it.
History was made on Friday when Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally threw open Kashmir’s most ambitious railway project, bringing to fruition a 130-year-old dream of connecting the Valley to the country’s railway grid.
Like the famed seven wonders, the project boasts at least seven milestones in India’s infrastructure landscape.
But the fanfare around its inauguration masks an irony: the project stretched 42 years, encompassing the tenures of 10 Prime Ministers — from Indira Gandhi, who laid the foundation in 1983, to Modi, who delivered its completion on Friday.
Chief minister Omar Abdullah poignantly remarked how he was a Class VIII student in the year of the project’s foundation and how, 42 years on, even his children have graduated from college.
One of the most spectacular highlights of the rail link is that it passes through 36 tunnels (stretching a total 119km) and 943 bridges (combined length: 13km), which together make up nearly half the length of the 272km stretch from Udhampur to Baramulla.
Perhaps the route’s crown jewel is the 1,315-metre-long (4,314ft) steel-and-concrete bridge over the Chenab that connects two mountains with an arch 359m (1,178ft) above the water. Modi compared it to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which stands at 330m (1,083ft).
The railways say the bridge will last 120 years and can withstand extreme weather, including snowfall and wind speeds up to 260kmph, as well as earthquakes and landslides.
Modi stood on the Chenab Bridge and waved the Tricolour before boarding a train for a test run to reach another of the link’s marvels, the Anji Bridge, India’s first cable-stayed bridge.
The bridge, 862m (2,830ft) long and 331m (1,086ft) above the ground, connects the Katra and Reasi towns in Jammu. Its main pylon rises 193m (633ft) above its foundation.
Some of the project’s other high points are Tunnel 50, India’s longest at 12.775km, and the Pir Panjal Tunnel, the country’s second-longest railway tunnel at 11.2km that connects Banihal in Jammu with Kashmir. Above all, the route offers panoramic views of Kashmir’s landscape, from the mountains and plains to the orchards and meadows, in all seasons of the year.
In contrast to the 42 years it has taken India to complete the project, China took only 5 years for the 1,956km Qinghai Tibet Railways, which touches a peak of 5,068m (16,627ft) at Tanggulla, said to be the world’s highest railway station.
Of the 10 Prime Ministers whose terms oversaw the rail link, seven travelled to Jammu and Kashmir on multiple occasions for various foundation-laying or inauguration ceremonies. The three who did not were V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar and P.V. Narasimha Rao. It was the Dogra rulers who first conceived of a rail link between Kashmir and the rest of the country — as early as 1898 — but they could take it only till Jammu.
But even this got de-linked from the country’s rail grid because of Partition — a portion of it passed through what is now Pakistan’s Punjab province. It was reconnected in 1970 via Pathankot in Punjab.
Indira Gandhi had in 1983 laid the foundation stone for a 54km railway line between Jammu and Udhampur. She promised to complete it in five years and later extend it by another 290km to Baramulla in Kashmir. (The route was later shortened, and the Udhampur-Baramulla stretch inaugurated on Friday is 272km.) However, no progress was made with Indira getting caught up in the Punjab problem.
In 1986, her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi repeated the ritual of laying the foundation stone for the same Udhampur-Jammu stretch. Nothing was heard of it during the next decade. In 1995, at the peak of the Kashmir militancy, Rao decided to have the foundation stone laid for the same 54km stretch again. He chose not to visit himself but sent his railway minister, Suresh Kalmadi. In 1996, his final year at the helm, Rao sanctioned ₹2,600 crore for the extension of the rail link from Udhampur to Baramulla.
The Congress lost power that year, and it was H.D. Deve Gowda who, as United Front Prime Minister, was destined to repeat the ritual of laying the foundation stone for the extension, again in Udhampur, in March 1997.
Gowda lost his crown shortly, and two months later, Inder Kumar Gujral, his successor, performed the same ceremony, only this time in Baramulla in the Valley.
Some real progress came when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared the Udhampur-Baramulla stretch a national project in 2002, slating it for inauguration in 2007. It has taken 18 years more, with the cost escalating from ₹6,800 crore (as estimated in 2002) to nearly ₹44,000 crore.
Over the subsequent years, the foundation ceremonies gave way to the inaugurations of stretches of the project.
Manmohan Singh presided over the first inauguration in 2005. This was the 54km Jammu-Udhampur stretch, seeing the light of day 22 years after the foundation was laid. What Modi inaugurated on Friday was the last remaining stretch of 63km.