The Amarnath yatra is short and high and, more than any other route here, administered as a security operation.
Ice, and the control around it
The object of the pilgrimage is an ice stalagmite in a cave at about 3,880 metres, venerated as a lingam of Shiva, which forms and melts with the season and in some years has gone before the yatra ends. Everything about access is controlled by a statutory shrine board: fixed dates each year, registration of every pilgrim, a compulsory health certificate, a daily cap, and movement under heavy armed escort. Cardiac and altitude deaths are recorded and published every season, and the yatra has been attacked, with pilgrims killed in 2000 and 2017.
Not only a religious question
The origin story is recent and contested, crediting a Muslim shepherd with the rediscovery and formerly assigning a share of the offerings to his family, an arrangement ended when the shrine board was constituted by statute in 2000. In 2008 a transfer of forest land to that board set off mass protests in the Kashmir valley and counter-protests in Jammu, with deaths on both sides, and the transfer was reversed. The scale of the modern yatra, and the politics attached to it, are phenomena of the late twentieth century rather than of deep tradition.