India orders students, visitors to leave region

SRINAGAR, India — Thousands of Indian students and visitors were fleeing Indiancontrolled Kashmir on Saturday after the government ordered tourists and Hindu pilgrims visiting a Himalayan cave shrine “to curtail their stay” in the disputed territory, citing security concern.

Hundreds of Indian and foreign visitors, including some Hindu pilgrims, congregated outside the main terminal at the airport in Srinagar, the region’s main city, seeking seats on flights out of the region. Most were unlikely to get tickets, however, as authorities had yet to arrange additional flights, officials said.

On Friday, Indian aviation authorities told airlines to be ready to operate additional flights from Srinagar to ferry pilgrims and tourists out, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Tourists and pilgrims also took buses out of the region after authorities went to hotels in the tourist resorts of Pahalgam and Gulmarg on Friday evening, telling them to leave the region.

Authorities also bused out hundreds of Indian students from some colleges in Srinagar.

The order on Friday cited the “prevailing security situation” and the “latest intelligence inputs of terror threats with specific targeting” of the annual Hindu pilgrimage as reasons for the advisory.

The order came after officials suspended the pilgrimage for four days on Thursday due to bad weather along the route.

The pilgrimage began on July 1 and more than 300,000 pilgrims have visited the icy cave so far this year, according to officials.

The order has intensified tensions following India’s announcement that it was sending thousands of more troops to one of the world’s most militarized areas, sparking fears in Kashmir that New Delhi was planning to scrap an Indian constitutional provision that forbids Indians from outside the region from buying land in the Muslim-majority territory.

In its election manifesto earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party promised to do away with special rights for Kashmiris under India’s constitution.

Rumors had swirled in the region on Friday, ranging from disarming of Kashmiri police forces to the Indian military taking over local police installations and schools being ordered closed, further ratcheting up tension.

By Friday night, residents in Srinagar and other towns thronged grocery stores and medical shops to stock up on essentials. They lined up at ATMs to take out money and at gas stations to fill up their vehicles.