Blocked, Stranded, Waiting: The Anti-National Highway?

On a Saturday morning in February 2013, my flight to New Delhi didn’t take off due to foggy Kashmir weather.

The next day, too, the weather prediction was foggy, and there was hardly any possibility of the flight taking off. So, I opted to travel by the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway.

When I walked out on Sunday morning, Srinagar was still sleeping. I had been selected for an interview in New Delhi for a job with a New York-based multinational company, and the chance of leaving Kashmir for a job, for a career, made me excited.

At 5:30 am, I got into a Tata Sumo cab. We set out for the journey on the National Highway 1-A, now renamed National Highway-44, the only road that connects Kashmir to the rest of the world. I thought the distance of around 300 km then, now only 270, to Jammu would at most take 6 to 8 hours. My interview was on Monday at 3 pm. I had decided to take a train from Jammu in the evening to reach Delhi in the morning the next day. But the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway has a way of mocking arithmetic.

Just 76 km from Srinagar, the cab stopped.

“Landslides,” the driver said. “Shooting stones, traffic frozen in both directions.”

Soon it was noon, and I was still only 80 km from home. The chance of taking the train after my flight couldn’t take off was also gone. As I stepped out of the cab, my dreams crashed.

I walked back home with nothing but failure. My father sat in silence. My mother clung to a kettle, as if Nun Chai could undo fate. But the truth was clear. A job I might have had, a life I might have lived, had been taken from me by a highway.

What appears on the map as a National Highway, is more a nightmare than a road. No wonder, people here know it by other names – the road to nowhere, the road of death, and the anti-national highway.

I quickly learned that my story was not unusual. Everyone in Kashmir has one. A fellow journalist, Moazum Mohammad, once left Delhi at 6 am. By 5:30 pm, he was already in Jammu, having covered 900 km without breaking a sweat. However, from Jammu to Srinagar, a distance mere 270 km, he entered a purgatory.

At Banihal, he was stranded with hundreds of others. Men, women, and children shivering at -7 degrees Celsius as the road beneath lay buried in snow.

“I wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for a phone call,” he said after his nightmarish trip.

A contact tipped him off about a home-stay 3 km uphill. He trudged through a storm, fell into a pit, cursed the mountain, but reached Gund, where the hosts gave him a bed.

“I slept like a horse,” Moazum said.

The next morning, he continued his journey, humbled.

Another time, he was not so lucky when stuck until 2:30 am in -12 degrees Celsius, his stomach empty.

A local politician intervened, finding him shelter in a house where the landlord’s wife served him dinner at 3:30 am.

“Despite being born and brought up in Kashmir, I never knew cold like that,” he said.

These are the details that never make it to government reports or tourism brochures. Women walking into the dark hillsides to relieve themselves because there are no toilets; government shelter homes locked, waiting for VIPs; truck drivers dozing beside consignments that never reach Delhi on time; children crying in cars while their mothers try hard to soothe them.

On paper, the road is a lifeline. In practice, it is a noose. When it closes, Kashmir starves. Vegetables and meat rot, eggs become stale, and apples blacken. Prices in Srinagar spike overnight. Flights become the only option. A one-way ticket to Delhi suddenly costs as much as a trip to Dubai. Families cancel weddings, students miss exams, patients die waiting for ambulances to move past Ramban.

Even 78 years after India won its independence, Kashmir remains dependent on a single, fragile artery.

Why?

When Naeem Akhtar, a senior People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader was a minister in the PDP-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition government in J&K, he said, “It’s nobody’s priority.”

Akhtar said the highway was maintained as a defense road, useful only for the movement of troops.

For civilians, it was an afterthought.

The other routes - across the Pir Panjal to Poonch, north Kashmir to Muzaffarabad, south Kashmir to Kishtwar - remained sealed by politics.

What had once been a crossroads of Central Asia, a part of the Silk Route, is now a dead end.

“It was never for us,” Akhtar said. “It was always for them.”

In 2017, while travelling with an atheist friend from New Delhi, we passed Panthal. As the rocks tumbled from the mountain, his face became pale. He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer, betraying the belief he had spent years denying. The road makes believers of us all - believers in God, in chance, in sheer dumb luck.

Some sections carry centuries of dread. Khoni Nallah, the stream of blood. Shaitani Nallah, the stream of Satan.

In 2017, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported that more deaths were reported on this highway from accidents than Kashmir had from the decades-long conflict. The road kills without politics, without ideology, without malice.

The politics of the highway is also the politics of humiliation. To travel on it is to be reminded of your smallness, your dependence. In winter, convoys of military trucks have the right of way. Civilian vehicles wait in line, sometimes for hours.

I remember once standing at a tea stall in Ramban, waiting for the road to reopen.

A truck driver beside me said, “This is not a road, it is a border.”

His apples were already a week old. If he missed the Azadpur Mandi in Delhi by another two days, the orchardist would lose the season’s earnings.

“The road eats everything,” he said.

There is also an economy of being stranded. On the worst nights, villagers open their homes to travellers - for a price. A mat on the floor, a bowl of rice, costs more than a hotel room in Srinagar. Shops sell water at double the price. Everyone knows the road is an opportunity as much as it is a curse.

Women suffer the most. There are no public toilets and no place to nurse children.

Yet for all its cruelty, the road is also a teacher. It reveals the geography of abandonment. Every bend is a reminder that people here are at the margins. The smooth highways of Gujarat, the expressways of Uttar Pradesh, the flyovers of Delhi – these are the symbols of progress. Here, progress ends at the mountain.

The highway teaches us to measure time differently. In Delhi, an hour equals 60 minutes. In Banihal, an hour means nothing. You can spend it staring at a rock, waiting for it to fall or can spend it in a cab, the driver asleep.

I sometimes wonder what life would have been for me if I had caught that flight. Perhaps I would have passed the interview. Perhaps I would be working in New York, complaining about traffic on Broadway, sipping coffee at Starbucks in Manhattan. Instead, I am here, writing about a road that consumes our lives like an unending tragedy.

But maybe that is the point. The road is not just macadam and stone. It is a metaphor, a mirror of Kashmir itself.

The last time I travelled by road, a friend accompanying me looked at the line of trucks and said, “Every story in Kashmir begins with this road.”

I knew what he meant. Births, deaths, weddings, exams, jobs, pilgrimages - everything is at the mercy of this highway.

And yet, it binds us. To travel on it is to share in a collective ordeal, to see strangers become companions in suffering. One person will offer you a biscuit, someone else will lend you a shawl, and a child throwing tantrums at his parents will make you burst into laughter in the middle of despair.

When I close my eyes, what I remember most about travelling on the highway is not the sound of vehicles, but of silence – the silence of resignation.

That silence is why the road is referred to as the “anti-national highway”. Not because it resists, but because it resists its own people.

In 2017, as rocks fell from the mountain at Panthal and my atheist friend whispered a prayer, I realised that the highway is not a road, but a theology of failure. On it, we are all believers – believers in a tomorrow that may or may not come.

Until then, we wait.