CRPF personnel patrol the route to the Amarnath shrine on Tuesday. (Reuters)

Srinagar, June 17: The first batch of pilgrims today left for Amarnath amid a controversy over the state’s transfer of forest land to the board managing the cave shrine.

Offering protection during the two-month yatra is Jammu and Kashmir’s biggest security drill, involving an additional 10,000 troops, including 50 companies of the CRPF.

Higher education minister G.S. Charak flagged off the group of 2,500. They had reached the base camps at Pahalgam and Baltal this evening and would leave for the shrine, at a height of 3,888 metres, tomorrow morning.

The distance through the traditional Pahalgam route is 44.8km, which is covered in four days, but a return trek through the 13km Baltal path can take only a day.

“We have deployed 37 companies, including two women platoons, on the roads leading to Baltal and Pahalgam. Another 13 will escort pilgrims from Jammu to the base camps,” CRPF spokesman Prabkhar Tripathi said.

The chief executive officer of Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, Arun Kumar, said all arrangements had been put in place. “We have fixed a grille in front of the ice lingam to prevent tampering after complaints last year.”

But more than security concerns, which dogged the yatra in the past, it is the land row that has cast a shadow on the trip this time. The National Conference and separatists are crying foul over the transfer 40 hectares of forest land at Baltal to the shrine board for pilgrim facilities.

The opposition, on grounds ranging from the religious to ecological, stems from fears that the move was aimed at building permanent dwellings for “settlers”.

Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani has launched an agitation against the transfer, accusing outgoing Governor S.K. Sinha, the shrine board’s chairman, of working on a plan to “change the demography of the state by starting settling outsiders on the land”.

The state’s official grand mufti, Bashir-ud-Din, has also urged people to stage demonstrations against the move.

Peoples Democratic Party leader and forest minister Qazi Afzal, who pushed the transfer through, now claims he was pressured into doing it by Congress ministers Mangat Ram Sharma and G.S. Charak.

Deputy chief minister Muzaffar Hussain Beig, also from the PDP, said the two ministers had threatened to stop work on Mughal road, connecting Jammu’s Muslim-majority districts with Kashmir, if the PDP blocked the transfer. “We were forced to compromise,” Beig told a local news agency.

Kumar, the shrine board’s CEO, denied the charges, saying they were only an attempt to “play communal politics”. “We are setting up 200 insulated huts for pilgrims and these will be dismantled after the yatra. We are not in favour of a permanent road to the cave but have proposed a ropeway,” he said in response to reports the board was laying a road through the forest zone.