OCCUPIED SRINAGAR: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday opened an 11-kilometer (7-mile) tunnel through the Himalayan terrain to help ease travel on a highway linking the troubled held Kashmir Valley with the rest of India.

Modi drove in an open jeep through the all-weather route, which is expected to help trade and tourism in the region. The highway is blocked sometimes for hours and even days due to heavy snow, monsoon rains and landslides.

It took engineers six years to build the tunnel, which cost 25 billion rupees ($382 million).

However, Kashmiri leaders shut businesses and public transport in the region on Sunday and said the construction of tunnels and roads would not succeed in appeasing them. Kashmir is a “political issue and not a problem related to governance, economic packages, incentives or law and order,” they said in a joint statement issued on Friday.

They said Modi was visiting the state at a time when the situation was “extremely gloomy.”

Modi addressed a rally of thousands of people in the town of Udhampur and urged the youth of held Kashmir to choose between “terrorism and tourism.”

He said decades of insurgency had caused bloodshed and hit tourism, a mainstay of the region.

Modi promised to boost the region’s tourism infrastructure, saying that the new tunnel would ensure that tourists were not stranded because of bad weather.

Jitendra Singh, a minister in Modi’s government from the region, said the connectivity through the tunnel would cut down travel time.

“It is an alternative to the highway, which gets closed during snow and rain. It will boost trade and increase revenue in the state,” Singh said.-AP

AFP adds A grenade explosion killed a police officer and injured 10 other security personnel in Indian-held Kashmir on Sunday, police said, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the tense region.

Suspected rebels lobbed a grenade at a group of police and paramilitary troops in the main city of occupied Srinagar following protests against Modi’s visit.

“Four personnel of CRPF and seven policemen were injured in the grenade blast,” Bhuvesh Choudhary, spokesman of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) said.

One of the police officers who was wounded in the blast later died of his injuries, inspector general Javid Gillani told.—AFP