Every time the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway shuts down, the Valley is reminded of how narrow its margins have become. Landslides, heavy snowfall, subsidence, and congestion routinely disrupt supplies, trade, and daily life. What is often described as Kashmir’s “lifeline” has, over time, revealed itself as a point of chronic vulnerability.
The immediate question is usually technical: how to keep the road open through tunnels, widening, and all-weather upgrades. But the deeper question is structural. Why has a region that was once highly connected been reduced to dependence on a single, fragile corridor?
Until the mid-20th century, Kashmir was not defined by isolation. Its most natural economic outlet ran westward along the Jhelum Valley Road, connecting Srinagar with Uri, Muzaffarabad, and onward to Rawalpindi. The road via Ladakh used to take the travellers and traders to the current Chinese province of Xinjiang or the East Turkistan city of Khotan, Kashgar, Yarqand, and other linkages would lead deep into Tibet and Tajikistan.
Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Road followed the river, respected the terrain, and linked the Valley directly to the commercial centres of western Punjab.
It was more than a road. It was an economic system shaped by geography. Agricultural produce, timber, carpets, shawls, and handicrafts moved outward with ease. Machinery, essentials, and capital flowed inward. Commerce and terrain reinforced each other. Kashmir functioned as an integrated economic space rather than a landlocked hinterland.
The events of 1947 and before that severed all these arteries. While other linkages dried up in phases, the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad linkage became a casualty of the Line of Control, which did more than divide territory.
It disrupted Kashmir’s established economic logic. What followed was not the reopening of alternative natural routes, but the elevation of a politically convenient one. The Jammu–Srinagar Road became the primary axis not because it was historically or economically optimal, but because it aligned with post-Partition administrative arrangements.
That shift continues to shape everyday realities.
Lifeline by Necessity
The vulnerabilities of the Jammu–Srinagar highway are often treated as engineering challenges. More tunnels, more lanes, and greater investment are expected to deliver resilience. But geography is not easily overridden. A steep, snowbound route through fragile terrain cannot fully substitute for corridors that evolved with the landscape.
For Kashmir’s business community, this dependence has never been abstract. Each closure brings delayed consignments, rising costs, disrupted supply chains, and uncertainty for producers and traders. Economic activity remains hostage to weather conditions and security advisories.
The issue is not the existence of the Jammu–Srinagar highway. It is its exclusivity.
This is why the limited opening of Cross-Line of Control trade along parts of the old Jhelum alignment generated cautious optimism within Kashmir’s trading community. The response was not driven by sentiment. It was rooted in economic recognition.
Even under a restricted barter system, with limited goods lists and no formal banking channels, trade revived quickly. Historic routes tend to revive economic memory. They reconnect markets that were separated by politics rather than by logic.
That experiment was never allowed to mature. It remained politically fragile and administratively constrained, and was eventually suspended. Yet in its short lifespan, it demonstrated a simple truth. Connectivity aligned with geography carries transformative potential. It can reduce economic distortions and create space for confidence where mistrust dominates.
Around the same time, large-scale regional connectivity projects began reshaping trade patterns, most notably the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Much of the discussion around such initiatives has overlooked a central reality. These corridors do not run around Kashmir. They run through it, via Gilgit-Baltistan, which forms part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Connectivity projects that pass-through territories without meaningful local participation risk reinforcing exclusion rather than enabling development. When a region is treated merely as a transit zone, connectivity becomes extractive. The benefits flow through it, but rarely remain.
Seen together, the closure of historic routes, the brief opening of cross-LoC trade, and the passage of major corridors through the wider Kashmir region are not separate developments. They reflect the same unresolved tension between geography and politics.
Kashmir once functioned as a crossroads. Today, it operates as a bottleneck.
Reimagining Kashmir as an economic subject rather than a strategic inconvenience does not substitute political resolution. It complements it. Special economic arrangements, shared trading spaces, and multiple corridors rooted in geography can serve as confidence-building mechanisms rather than threats to sovereignty.
Beyond Single Road
The Jammu–Srinagar highway is necessary. But it was never meant to carry the entire weight of Kashmir’s economy. Its elevation into the Valley’s sole lifeline was a political choice, not a geographic inevitability.
Resilience comes from plurality. East, west, north, and south. Multiple routes that allow economies to adapt and societies to interact.
Until Kashmir’s natural corridors are acknowledged and allowed to function, infrastructure will remain fragile, markets distorted, and normalcy elusive.
The road not taken still exists. The question is whether there is finally space to let geography do what politics has long prevented.
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