TIL Desk/National/Jammu-Keeping their tryst with the Hindu deity Mata Ragnya, hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits on Sunday paid obeisance at the Tullamulla shrine in north Kashmir’s Ganderbal district. Using different modes of conveyance, Kashmiri Pandits, most of them migrants, started reaching Tullamulla town, 24 km from Srinagar, since Saturday evening. The annual festival of Mata Kheer Bhawani, the name used by local Pandits for goddess Ragnya, is celebrated each year on this day.
Despite their exodus from Kashmir Valley in the beginning of 1990s due to separatist violence, members of the Pandit community have not given up their practice of visiting the temple. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti also visited the shrine in the morning. A group of migrant Pandits shouted slogans blaming the separatists for their migration and for opposing their return to the valley. They also accused the mainstream political parties of “non-serious approach to problems faced by the Pandit community”.
