Srinagar to Leh

After renumbering, the Srinagar-Leh Road is part of National Highway 1.  This is “the highway connecting Uri, Baramula, Sringar, Kargil and terminating at Leh in State of J&K”.  I have never driven along this road, but I believe the view is beautiful and the drive exciting. After all, it traverses Zoji La and Fotu La and the stretch near Zoji La figures in lists of most dangerous roads in India. The road links Kashmir and Ladakh. In 1911, Francis Younghusband wrote his book, “Kashmir”. Since “La” means “Pass”, Zoji La Pass is inappropriate. But we continue to say Zoji La Pass as the British, and Younghusband, did. “Up this valley also lies the road to the Zoji-La Pass on the far side of which branch off roads to Baltistan, on the one hand, with its fine ibex-shooting ground, immense glacier region, and the second highest mountain in the world; and on the other to Ladak with its Buddhist monasteries perched on any inaccessible rocky pinnacle that can be found, and Leh, the meeting-place of caravans from Lhasa and from Central Asia — a most quaint and picturesque little town embedded among bare, sun-baked mountains which has been the starting-point of two journeys I have made across the dreary, lofty Karakoram Pass (18,500 feet) to Turkestan and to the Pamirs.” In Younghusband’s time, it wasn’t much of a road.

A few years later, in 1931 and 1934, Rupert Wilmot travelled through Ladakh, taking photographs. With text by Nicky Harman and Roger Bates, those pictures were published in a book, “The Lost World of Ladakh”. “By the 1930s, goods were trucked or sent by train to Srinagar, where they were loaded onto horses. It then took 14-16 days to reach Leh. The pass of Zoji-La and the Lamayuru defile were the most difficult parts of the route.” When did it become a proper road, transcending tracks even ponies found difficult to cross? The first turning point seems to be 1834, when Ladakh became part of the Dogra empire, thanks largely to General Zorawar Singh. But at that time, though trade through Ladakh and beyond seems to have been recognised as important, nothing much was done about the road proper.  For example, the 1846 Treaty between the British and Maharaja Gulab Singh required the latter to pay an annual tribute to the former of “twelve pashmina goats and three pairs of shawls”. The 1870 Treaty between Ranbir Singh, Gulab Singh’s son, and Thomas Douglas Forsyth, on behalf of the British, brought in the maintenance of the road, as a responsibility of Jammu and Kashmir state. The Srinagar-Leh-Yarkland road became a Treaty Road. I haven’t been able to track down the original source. But several people say that from 1873, Jammu and Kashmir state spent Rs 2,500 every year on maintenance of the road.

But was trade to Ladakh and beyond really that important, as opposed to strategic importance of the road? Several decades before Younghusband, between 1819 and 1825, William Moorcroft and George Trebeck travelled in “the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab; in Ladakh and Kashmir; in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz and Bokhara”. In 1841, the Asiatic Society of Calcutta published this travelogue in two volumes, edited by the great Horace Hayman Wilson. In this, “The commerce of Ladakh is of no great value or interest as affects the produce or consumption of the country itself, although may be taken into account in the general result.  Its chief consideration, however, arises from its centrical (sic) situation, by which it becomes the great thoroughfare for an active commercial intercourse between Tiber, Turkistan, China, and even Russia on the one hand, and Kashmir, the Panjab, and the plains of Hindustan on the other.”  

Back to the turning points, the next one was setting up of Border Roads Organisation in May 1960. However, even more important as a turning point was declaration of the Srinagar-Leh road as a National Highway in 2006. This was the old NH 1D, now part of NH 1, along with the old NH 1A. Not long ago, there weren’t all-weather roads to Ladakh.  Now there are (will be) two, the other one being via Manali. Not long ago (May 2018), the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone for the Zoji la tunnel. That 14 km Zoji la tunnel will be India’s longest road tunnel and Asia’s longest bi-directional tunnel, reducing time taken to cross Zoji la from 3.5 hours to 15 minutes. On that same visit, but in Jammu and not in Leh, PM inaugurated some other projects, including Jammu’s Ring Road. This was done in General Zorawar Singh Auditorium of Jammu University. In 2003, Jammu University received a grant to construct a new auditorium complex and this was inaugurated in 2007 and named after General Zorowar Singh. Perhaps the name is an obvious choice, but it took my mind back to 1830s.

The author is chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. Views are personal.