Under heavy guard, Hindu pilgrimage resumes at site of deadly Kashmir attack

Eleven weeks after a deadly militant attack, Kashmir’s Amarnath pilgrimage resumes. Photo / Getty Images

Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir – Eleven weeks after militants targeted Hindu tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 26 people and sparking conflict between India and Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees set out from Pahalgam, the site of the attack, for an annual pilgrimage through the disputed territory.

The Indian Government has deployed a security force of tens of thousands to facilitate the journey by pilgrims through one of the most militarised zones in the world.

A once-popular destination for local residents and Indian tourists, Pahalgam has become a garrison town.

The highway into Pahalgam, along which an Indian paramilitary soldier is stationed every 30m, is exclusively reserved for pilgrims.

Locals and tourists must pass their possessions through X-ray scanners before taking a narrow, circuitous back road, past dense pine forests and makeshift bunkers piled with sandbags.

In the town, vehicles representing different security forces in the region – the light-blue Tata armoured trucks of the Central Reserve Police Force, the green personnel carriers of the Indian Army, the squat Humvee-style vehicles of the special forces – roll through the streets, side by side with some 10,000 saffron-clad pilgrims chanting devotions to Shiva.

The chaos and crowding in Pahalgam during the Amarnath Yatra pilgrimage is a far cry from the scene in the town following April 22, when three gun-toting militants emerged from the nearby woods and opened fire, killing 25 Indians and one Nepali.

The Indian Government has alleged that the militants, who remain at large, were Pakistani nationals operating with the tacit backing of the Pakistani Government. Islamabad has denied responsibility for the Pahalgam attack.

On May 7, India launched strikes on Pakistan, sending the two nuclear powers into an escalatory tit-for-tat that ended three days later, when New Delhi and Islamabad agreed to a ceasefire, which has held.

Kashmir, famed for its stunning alpine vistas and narrow, forested valleys, has been the centre of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan for decades.

Since the late 1980s, an armed separatist movement has mounted a dogged insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir, in response to which the Indian Government has militarised the region in waves of troop deployments and crackdowns.

“I have never seen such a heavy presence of security personnel in Pahalgam during the Amarnath pilgrimage,” said Tariq Ahmed, 47, a resident who rents ponies for pilgrims to ride.

“This place looks like a war zone. Every lane is secured with concertina wire, makeshift bunkers and soldiers.”

About 42,000 members of the Indian security forces have been dispatched to Indian-administered Kashmir, according to local media reports, in what appeared to be the heaviest security deployment for the pilgrimage.

Fears over a security incident have worsened but are long-standing: The Amarnath Yatra has been the target of militant attacks in the past, including as recently as 2017, and gunmen attacked a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir last summer.

Pilgrimage registrations are down 10% compared with last year, Manoj Sinha, the Indian Government’s representative in Jammu and Kashmir, told local media outlets.

“After the Pahalgam attack, my family was scared to let me visit Kashmir. But I had full faith in Lord Amarnath” – a manifestation of Shiva – “and in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” said Vipul Kacha, 49, a pilgrim from Gujarat, India.

“Our initial anxiety waned when we saw soldiers guarding us throughout our journey. There is no reason to fear, as everything is secured here.”

The pilgrims travel in armed convoys monitored by drones and pass through armed checkpoints and facial recognition scans on their way to the Shri Amarnath Cave Temple, a shrine containing a sacred ice pillar.

“The fact that an unusually high number of paramilitary companies have been posted to secure the Amarnath Yatra this year clearly shows that it is politically important, and that’s why a very high quantum of resources have been dedicated to the Yatra,” said Sushant Singh, a Yale University lecturer and former Indian military official.

Staging the Amarnath Yatra has increasingly become both a show of strength and an ideological tool for New Delhi, especially under Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics.

During the 1980s, the Amarnath Yatra was an informally organised, 15-day pilgrimage that drew a few thousand attendees per year, according to a report from the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a federation of rights groups.

Since then, however, successive Indian governments seeking to maintain a semipermanent Hindu foothold in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, have transformed the pilgrimage into a government-managed affair lasting well over a month.

Last year, 510,000 pilgrims took part in the Amarnath Yatra, according to the Indian Government.

The surge has drawn local criticism.

“A spiritual religious exercise has been turned into a political spectacle,” said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chief Muslim cleric of Kashmir.

“The number of pilgrims visiting each year is passed off as a marker of ‘[normality] in the valley.’ The more the number, the more the ‘normalcy.’ It’s more a propaganda tool in which the religious and spiritual aspect gets lost.”

In August 2019, the Modi Government unilaterally abrogated Article 370, a clause in the Indian constitution that guaranteed near-autonomous status to Indian-administered Kashmir and instituted a harsh crackdown on dissent and civil society.

The ensuing quiet in the region – touted as a new normality by the Indian Government – ended with the Pahalgam attack.

After this, Indian security forces launched another round of sweeping crackdowns, detaining thousands and bulldozing the homes of suspected separatists.

“The feeling which has been in Kashmir for the last three decades or more is that they’ve been caught in this pincer between India and Pakistan, in which eventually the suffering that happens is only for the Kashmiris,” Singh said. “No one else suffers as much as the Kashmiris.”

In contrast to Hindu pilgrims, Kashmiri Muslims are regularly barred from worshipping at the Jama Masjid, Srinagar’s central mosque, on religious holidays and sensitive occasions.

Security forces closed the Jama Masjid and surrounded the site with troops during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in early June, and when a contentious bill regulating Islamic sites was under debate in the Indian Parliament in April.

The Indian Government’s “closure of the Jama Masjid during special and important days of the Muslim calendar illustrates the complete disregard it has for the religious rights and sentiments of the Muslim community”, said Farooq, who is seen as the spiritual leader of Kashmiri Muslims.

Enhanced security restrictions also mean that the local Kashmiri economy is unable to benefit to the same degree from the pilgrimage.

Pilgrims already exist in an ecosystem largely separate from that of local Kashmiri life. This year, pilgrims camp in government-provided tents, eat from government-subsidised food stalls for free and complete the pilgrimage without passing through Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir’s largest city.

As soon as the Amarnath Yatra began, Aqib Saleem, 28, a vendor who sold apple juice along a highway leading to Pahalgam, found the road had been sealed off. Saleem decided to close his stall on Saturday after no customers appeared, he said.

“Now we are all suspicious in the eyes of tourists,” said Ahmed, a vendor near Pahalgam. “Pahalgam is the beautiful face of Kashmir, but the beautiful face has a scar now.”