Slung across Chenab river canyon, the Chenab bridge is by all accounts considered a modern engineering marvel. Two decades in the making, it is at once a post-card moment, a monument to ingenuity, and a symbol of progress—everything one would expect from the biggest, strongest, best, and most challenging project for Indian Railways since 1947.
“While describing Mother India, we have been saying the phrase Kashmir to Kanyakumari for a long time,” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the triumphant inauguration on June 6, referring to the southern port city in Tamil Nadu. “This has now become a reality for the railway network as well.”
Jammu and Kashmir is connected with India through the Jammu–Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Line (JUSBRL), a segment of a vast railway network in India’s nation-building project. The Chenab bridge itself is in the southwestern Reasi district, north of Jammu. Designed to last 120 years, it rises 359 metres over the river, stretches over 1.3 kilometres long, and holds the title of the world’s highest single-archway railway bridge.
But in Kashmir, a bridge is not just a bridge. Since the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in August 2019, India has overturned protective land and domicile laws, intensified military presence, encouraged settlement in the Valley, and turned tourism, Bollywood films and apple orchards into double-edged tools of propaganda and exodus.
As Chenab was inaugurated, the spectacular bridge became a focal point for international pressure on companies and investors continuing to quietly profit off India’s military occupation and human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.
A report by Canadian activist organization Just Peace Advocates (JPA) and Palestinian solidarity organization Al Haq identifies Canadian investment in India’s occupation and illegal settlement in Kashmir. WSP Global, a Québec-based conglomerate with numerous offices across Canada, specifically came under fire for its role in the Jerusalem light rail and Tel Aviv Jerusalem Fast Train through annexed Jerusalem.
Since 2022, WSP has been repeatedly submitted to the UN database of companies involved in illegal Israeli settlement. But its role in India’s mountain-to-sea vision has been more muted.
Ostensibly a “made-in-India” marvel, but stamped out by global capital. While WSP Finland and Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner were the design consultants on Chenab, the WSP subsidiary is wholly owned by WSP Global. La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) is the largest institutional shareholder in WSP at 13.89 per cent, followed by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) holding 8.9 per cent. Lesser shares are held by RBC, Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management, BMO, TD, and CIBC.
“States must prevent, investigate, punish and redress human rights abuses carried out by companies domiciled in their jurisdicitons through effective policies, legislation, regulations and adjudication,” Susan Power and Joel Bedda of Al Haq wrote to rabble.ca.
“Canada should formally alert WSP to its wrongdoing in the conflict affected areas and its requirement to conduct enhanced human rights due diligence,” they added, calling for the withdrawal of all public support and services from WSP “upon its failure to disengage from the territories, while ensuring access to appropriate remedies for the victim communities.”
Infrastructure dump
For decades under occupation, Kashmir has been torn by the great power politics and colonial occupations that have swept through the Himalayas. But now the mountains are quickly emerging as a hotspot in the global critical mineral scramble. Remote and long-neglected villages around Reasi, ostensibly being served by the Chenab bridge, are trapped between the rivalries of neighbouring states and the securitization of mining in the Himalayan foothills.
In 2023, India generated hype around the discovery of 5.9 million tonnes of inferred lithium deposits. Communities in the Salal-Haimana foothills faced looming development, with over 300 families fearing displacement from industrial incursion. Militants part of Kashmir-based People’s Anti-Fascist Front—designated by India as a Jaesh-aligned terrorist group—even threatened to attack companies keen on the region’s lithium deposits. India targeted militants active in the region, including an offshoot of Pakistan-based Islamist group Jaesh-e-Muhammad.
Last year, however, the lithium deposits were deemed inaccurately measured, and the auction of two land packages failed to attract bidders. Communities were left in uncertainty, with major infrastructure continuing to make headway.
Since India abrogated the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, infrastructural invasion has scaled up. For Mona Bhan, anthropologist at Syracuse University, the Chenab bridge encompasses the totality of this occupation. Bhan studies the use of economic and infrastructure development in counter-insurgency operations, including the use of dams to forcibly reshape Kashmir’s physical and social landscapes. Ring-roads, highways, hydro-power lines—all trace the silhouettes of 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 told rabble. “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 explained, the government and developers lost sight of the region’s geological stability. In an active seismic zone with increasing investment into what she called “an infrastructure dump”, the colonization of Kashmir is actually adding geological pressure onto an already volatile region.
It’s not just about natural tectonic movement, or landslides and floods. Human-made construction can actually change the stability, pressure, and behaviour of the earth. The study of anthropogenically-modified landscapes is still an emerging field, but critics see this reciprocity between human activity on geological behaviour and the vulnerability of built environments to natural disasters as an inseparable part of India’s military invasion.
The Chenab bridge should withstand high wind, earthquakes in India’s highest seismic risk zone, and even explosions. But whistleblower Alok Kumar Verma, a retired Chief Engineer of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link project, raised doubts over the railway’s structural integrity along the Katra-Banihal section, including the Chenab Bridge. Verma identified safety risks including “superficial load testing, inadequate fire safety, and the failure to address critical disaster management measures.” Verma’s campaign even garnered the Delhi High Court’s support.
Nonetheless, with the bridge completed in 2022, the first testing trains rumbled over the arch last June.
The Chenab’s promises are grand. Rural communities will no longer be isolated. Kashmiri students will go to Indian schools. Troops, tourists, and cargo will come and go. Apples from Kashmiri orchards, it is said, will finally make it to Delhi markets in a single day. Weather-permitting. But cross-border movement between Pakistan-administered and India-administered Kashmir is severely restricted. Raids, academic purges and travel bans have quashed human rights activism and a free press in Kashmir. Over the summer, Modi’s government executed a sweeping literary ban and security forces raided bookstores, permitted to seize “secessionist” literature from public and private spaces. Even within its own borders, Kashmir is locked into itself.
“While you’re building infrastructure, you’re also disconnecting,” Bhan said. “That is, to me, imposing an immobility that we don’t often think of as immobility.”
Like many other scholars and activists, Bhan has been unable to return to Kashmir to document the human rights impacts of India’s intensified development. “Unfortunately a lot of people are tight-lipped about what exactly the consequences might be,” she added.
There’s a line that can make families and friends military and surveillance targets, even abroad, and it’s not exactly clear where it lies.
Policies of erasure
The Government of India has “falsely portrayed Kashmiri Muslims as violent terrorists being funded and supported by Pakistan, therefore claiming their war on the people of IAJK as “cross-border counter-terrorism” efforts,” Kashmir Law and Justice Project (KLJP), a coalition of Kashmiri diaspora lawyers wrote on the 2024 “hearts and minds” military strategy Operation Sadbhavan. Earlier in August, Indian forces were launching into one of the longest counterinsurgency operations in recent years south of Srinagar. “The Indian Army is marketing its supposed solution to a problem that they themselves have created and sustained.”
Extrajudicial killings and excessive use of force by the Indian Army, paramilitary forces. Enforced disappearances and mass graves. The use of torture including against civilians. The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war by Indian forces. The arbitrary detention of journalists, activists, and political leaders, and imposed internet shutdowns. Human rights authorities have for decades documented systematic human rights violations and crimes against humanity by Indian forces and state-sponsored militias in Kashmir.
The rapid militarization, propaganda around regional economic development, incentivizing Hindu settlement of predominantly Muslim Kashmir have drawn parallels to the annexation, land grabs, and settlement of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza.
“[P]ractically, there is almost no enforcement mechanism and little international will to hold these rogue states accountable,” activists and lawyers Zainab Ramahi and Azadeh Shahshahani of Project South wrote in the wake of abrogation.
Responding to the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 that was claimed and retracted by Resistance Front militants, India’s Operation Sindoor stormed across the Line of Control into Pakistan—in repeated violation of the 1972 Simla Agreement—and rained airstrikes over children’s schools.
“Everyone who believes in humanity is with us,” Modi had said in Pahalgam. “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers.”
The security alliance between India and Israel is only deepening. Following the Islamist terrorist attack in Kashmir in April, an exchange between Netanyahu and Modi emphasized the countries’ counterterrorism alliance. India is already supplied with Israeli Harop drones, used in Operation Sindoor. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the two countries had also discussed “advancing the transportation and communications corridor that will link Asia – via Saudi Arabia and Israel – with Europe.”
The South Asia Terrorism Portal reports at least 124 terrorism-related incidents in Jammu and Kashmir this year.
Mere weeks before being preventatively detained in July lest he observe Kashmir Martyrs’ Day, J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah remarked at the inauguration: “What the British couldn’t achieve has finally been achieved. Jammu and Kashmir is finally connected with the rest of India.” The fluttering Indian flags draping the Chenab in orange, white and green were more than a celebration of an engineering marvel. They were a clear assertion of India’s claims on the turbulent region.
While WSP folded its Israeli operations on September 1, JPA and Al Haq state that the company remains complicit in occupation and apartheid. “WSP is complicit in systematic violations of Palestinians’ and Kashmiri’s rights and is in violation of gross breaches of international law,” they state.
Despite the diplomatic chill with India last year, Canada’s portfolio investments in India total over CAD $100 billion, with over 600 Canadian companies present in the country. And as global investment turns toward the Himalayas and India tightens its grips on Kashmir, human rights activists want to ensure that Canadian companies and investors are keenly aware of the regime of impunity that reigns over India-administered Kashmir.
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