Amid clanking of temple bells, a swarm of Kashmiri Pandits turned up for the annual Kheer Bhawani Mela in Kashmir’s Tulmulla. It’s a religious occasion for the community, yes, but it’s also an occasion for thousands of Kashmiri Pandits to come home, even if it is for a short spell.

After 75 years, Dashahar Kumbh Mela was held in Shadipora yesterday, at the confluence of rivers Sindhu and Vitasta, in Kashmir’s Ganderbal district. Here, there is a Shiva lingam and a chinar that’s considered sacred. Pandits believe that the tree is magical and even if the river rises, the chinar won’t sink.

At the temple, quarters have been set up for the Kumbh. One of the residents was Pandit Omkar Nath Shastri, the man at the centre of this “controversial” Mahakumbh yatra. A few days before the Kumbh, I went to meet him, genuinely curious and posing as a devotee. He sat with a vigilant coterie around him.

So, what was this Kumbh Yatra all about, I asked him.

“In India,” Shastri told me, “only at four places – Haridwar, Nasik, Ujjain and Allahabad – is the Maha Kumbh celebrated.” He added something about the connection between “jyotishi” (astrology) and “dharam” (faith), but I was more interested in the fact that Kashmir had joined the elite list.

Shastri is originally from Anantnag and he’d rather ignore the controversy over Sainik colonies and Pandit townships. “Kashmir is the fifth place, and it has a unique sangam of 10 yogs – something that happens nowhere else in India,” he said. “It is jyotish (astrological) formula,” he says. “When the jyotish (astrologer) finds 10 yog combined together, he announces the celebration of Maha Kumbh.”

The cynical might point out that the planets aligned themselves at a rather politically opportune moment, however, Shastri has little time for such practicalities. “Seventy-five years and 10 days ago, exactly on June 14, 1941, a Wednesday, Maha Kumbh was celebrated in Shadipora village of Ganderbal,” he said. “At the time, transportation was a problem in these parts. People used boats to come to the mela. The celebration lasted for a day. In 1941, around one lakh people thronged the Kumbh. They bathed in the holy waters and did pinddaan [offering prayers for ancestors].” Shastri told us he was expecting 50,000 devotees, which was about 30,000 more than the official expectation and 38,000 more than the actual number who came yesterday.

Around us, the Kheer Bhawani Mela resounded with bhajans. Pandit women decorated the temple square with earthen lamps. Many devotees offered milk and marigold flowers to the Shiva lingam.

But not everyone was immersed in prayer. Some travel-weary Pandits – now living in different states of India after being compelled to migrate en masse from Kashmir in the militant-1990s – dipped into nostalgia and wistfulness. The Kumbh Mela has given some Kashmiri Pandits a chance to return home. AK Koul, convenor of 21-member Maha Kumbh Celebration Committee, said he hoped the event would draw both non-Kashmiris and Kashmiris. “We were expecting more than 30,000 yatris,” he said. “But due to recent killings of army and policemen across the Valley, we are now expecting around 30,000 yatris, including 2000 non-Kashmiris.”

Koul was all praise for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president Sath Sharma, for “providing facilities and security” to the Yatra. “BJP played an instrumental role in arranging the mela. It has directed the tourism department to provide tents. The PDP-BJP government is also arranging 65 buses to transport devotees. The Army’s 16 RR battalion and the state police force have been already allotted to us,” he said.

However, regardless of the importance that Shastri may be according this Kumbh, it’s not universally accepted. “Before the migration,” says Tilakiya Koul, a Kashmiri Pandit who has turned up for the mela with his family, “we used to live in Vicharnag in Srinagar. Now we live in Rupnagar Jammu. I have never before heard of Kashmir’s Khumb Yatra.”

What the event has done, unwittingly, is shone a spotlight on the issue of the Pandits’ return to Kashmir. “Much water has flown down the Jhelum in the last 26 years,” said one of the Kumbh visitors. “We’ve created new lives elsewhere. How can we undo that now to return to a political-hotspot? Our children are doing well. Should they come back to the Valley and join the league of the jobless? The fact is, we have no hopes of coming back to Kashmir anytime soon.”

The Mehbooba Mufti government is under fire for its move to settle KPs in what it has termed as “transient camps.” The camps are coming up in Budgam and Qazigund. It wasn’t a popular idea with the Kumbh crowd.

There were those who spoke longingly of returning to their “roots”, but few were enamoured with the idea of settling down in “transient camps”. “Ever since we migrated from Kashmir,” said Vijayanti, a Kashmiri Pandit, “politicians only see us as a vote bank. In Vassu Qazigund, the concrete structures the government is constructing isn’t acceptable to KPs. We don’t want to live in them and become targets. It will be like living in an Israeli-settlement where everybody is a target.”

Considering how the new poster boy of Kashmiri militancy, Burhan Wani, made a video statement that his militant outfit, Hizb Ul Mujahideen, will attack any Pandit-only colonies, the concerns aren’t paranoid. In the same breath that the 21-year-old militant commander welcomes KPs to come live in their native places, he threatens the colonies. For the Pandits who migrated at a time when Kashmir was burning, there’s a sense of déjà vu.

Until last week, there was a fair amount of tension surrounding the Kumbh. Kashmir’s separatists claimed the event was “RSS’ cultural aggression”, to quote separatist Syed Ali Geelani’s spokesman Ayaz Akbar. “We will figure it from our history whether it was celebrated in Kashmir or not. If it was celebrated, we will allow them,” he’d said. The main opposition, the National Conference, expressed similar sentiments.

Ultimately, however, the political cacophony was drowned out. At Shadipora, those who came expressed gratitude to their Muslim brethren for being warm and gracious hosts. “The kind of response we received here has made me seriously think to return to Kashmir,” said Rajni Koul, a Pandit from Delhi. “Earlier we used to visit to valley for just attending the annual Kheer Bhavani under security cover. But now performing this yatra in open space has really boosted our morale.” Koul, who had returned to valley for the first time after migration in 1990s, rued that all these years she did not visit Kashmir because she’d feared the “media-fed propaganda”.

Others were more cautious. Kanya Lal, from Jammu, was equally happy about the “changed picture” of the Valley, but he cautioned, “Though we receive an overwhelming response here, we can’t take it as sign of normalcy. We want to use such yatras as process to gauge the mood of valley before taking a final call to return home.”