Road, Rail, and Air Infrastructures of Promise in the Himalayas

An online search for the phrase “Do airplanes fly over Mount Everest?” will uncover numerous videos, articles, and infographics outlining the complications of flying commercial aircraft over the highest mountain range in the world. While it’s possible to fly a jet over Everest, the safety implications are immense: increased wind and turbulence, the lack of a nearby airport that can accommodate jets, and no room for error if a safety incident occurs. This sense of the impenetrability of the world’s highest mountain range may be familiar to anyone who reads descriptions of the Himalayas. Such depictions are not new. Take, for instance, US army stories of the dangers of flying over “the hump” between Assam, Burma, and Yunnan during World War II or recent Chinese reports of workers constructing high-altitude railway beds on permafrost in Tibet for the benefit of development. These declarations of conquering and connecting points across or on either side of the mountain range are tightly tied to discourses of national territorial claims and state-led development projects. And yet, for centuries, communities living in Himalayan regions have been mobile, carving paths in and across the mountains in no less difficult conditions. How do we reconcile these two narratives, one of national power achieved through conquering impenetrability and the other of long-standing cross-border connections? This chapter explores how the relationships between infrastructures on two sides of the eastern Himalayan borders produces a narrative that is simultaneously about increased cross-border connections through development initiatives and about individual nation-state strengthening.