The Amarnath Yatra is a religious event conducted inside a security operation, and 2025 showed both halves at once.
The pilgrimage. At nearly 3,900 metres, the cave holds an ice stalagmite that waxes and wanes through the season and is venerated as a self-formed lingam of Shiva. Pilgrims reach it either by a long trek from Pahalgam or a short, brutal climb from Baltal, in a window of a few summer weeks. A statutory shrine board organises registration, the pony and porter economy, langars and helicopter services for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.
The security. The routes run through territory at the centre of the Kashmir conflict, and they have been attacked, most lethally in 2000 and in 2017. Every year the yatra is conducted behind a heavy deployment of troops and paramilitaries.
2025. In April 2025 gunmen killed twenty-six people, almost all tourists, at Baisaran meadow near Pahalgam, a town on the main pilgrimage route. The attack triggered a sharp military exchange between India and Pakistan in May. The yatra was held anyway, from 3 July to 9 August, shortened and protected by more than forty thousand personnel under a named security operation, and over three and a half lakh pilgrims completed it. The atlas records the attack and the militarisation plainly, because they are part of what this pilgrimage now is, without turning the entry into a commentary on the conflict.