The Chenab bridge in Kashmir is described as an engineering marvel and the world's highest single-archway railway bridge, It was inaugurated in June as part of India's railway network connecting Kashmir to the rest of India. However, the bridge has become a focal point for international criticism regarding India's military occupation and human rights violations in Kashmir since 2019.

Since India abrogated the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, infrastructural invasion has scaled up. For Mona Bhan, Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, the Chenab bridge encompasses the totality of this occupation.

“For the longest time, even before 2019, these projects were meant to recruit people, to provide them jobs and employment, but that in and of itself was framed as a counter-insurgency strategy,” she says. “Most of the infrastructure is security infrastructure because they are designed in particular to make the movement of military battalions easier.”

In the rush to develop Kashmir, Bhan explains, the government and developers lost sight of the region’s geological stability. In an active seismic zone with increasing investment into what she calls “an infrastructure dump”, the colonization of Kashmir is actually adding geological pressure onto an already volatile region. 

Read more in the rabble.ca article, “When a bridge is not just a bridge: Chenab railway.”