I. Ahmad Wani
Omar Abdullah’s visit to Kheer Bhavani echoes Mehbooba Mufti’s gesture a decade ago. Neither ritual has done what real governance still hasn’t.
PHOTO: Then Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti offers milk to the deity at Kheer Bhavani shrine, Tulmulla, June 2016
On June 18, 2026, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah walked into the Kheer Bhavani shrine at Tulmulla in Ganderbal, folded his hands at the sacred spring of Goddess Ragnya Devi, and checked on arrangements for the mela due on June 22. Cameras were there. Social media noticed. The story that went out was simple and warm: a Muslim Chief Minister joining in the spiritual atmosphere of a Hindu shrine.
It wasn’t the first time a Valley politician had done this, and it wasn’t even the most dramatic version. Ten years earlier, in June 2016, Mehbooba Mufti went further. As Chief Minister, she stood among Kashmiri Pandit devotees and poured milk into the spring herself, the same ritual whose changing colour has been read as omen for generations. She didn’t just attend. She participated.
Look at both moments side by side and a pattern starts to show. Two Chief Ministers, two different dynastic parties that have run Jammu and Kashmir for decades between them, two near-identical performances at the same spring. It seems that whenever a Valley-based mainstream party holds power, its leader feels some pull to prove “inclusiveness” by stepping into a ritual that belongs to someone else’s faith.
PHOTO: Chief Minister Omar Abdullah at Kheer Bhavani shrine ahead of the annual mela, June 18, 2026
That pull deserves a harder look than it usually gets. A Chief Minister has a real job at Kheer Bhavani, and it has nothing to do with prayer. Security for thousands of pilgrims, many of whom travel from Jammu after years away from the Valley. Water supply. Crowd management. Logistics that actually decide whether someone’s grandmother gets through the mela safely. As the local MLA for the area, Omar Abdullah showing up to oversee that work is not just acceptable, it’s exactly what the post requires.
Where the line gets crossed is the moment administration turns into performance: the folded hands, the milk in the palm, the ritual gesture borrowed from a faith that isn’t his own. No amount of milk poured into that spring will make Omar Abdullah or Mehbooba Mufti Hindu. And staying away from the ritual would not have made either of them less Muslim. Faith isn’t something you put on for an afternoon because the cameras are rolling. When a Chief Minister treats another community’s holiest rites as a backdrop for a harmony photo, it cheapens the rite and the office at the same time.
Here’s the part that actually matters and gets skipped every single year. Kashmiri Pandits were driven out of the Valley in the early 1990s. The same political families that now show up at Kheer Bhavani with folded hands have, across decades in power, failed to build the conditions for Pandits to return home in any real numbers. Unemployment among Kashmiri youth, Muslim, Pandit, Gujjar, Sikh alike, has stayed brutally high. Industry never took root. A government job became the only door anyone could see, and that scarcity bred resentment, and in some corners, danger. Security has improved in patches, but not enough that every family, regardless of religion, can say they sleep without worry.
None of that gets fixed by a temple visit. Equal access to jobs across communities isn’t a campaign line, it’s the floor beneath any functioning society. Policing that treats every citizen the same, without exception, isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s what lets neighbours of different faiths actually trust the street they share. A Valley where Pandit families in exile and Muslim families who never left can both expect the same future for their kids doesn’t arrive because a Chief Minister knelt at a spring. It arrives because someone built the jobs, ran the police fairly, and kept doing it long after the cameras left.
The waters at Kheer Bhavani are famous for changing colour, and people have read those colours as signs for centuries. The only sign worth watching now isn’t in the spring. It’s in whether unemployment numbers move, whether a Pandit family actually resettles in Anantnag or Baramulla, whether a court case against a powerful local gets the same outcome as one against nobody at all. The mela has grown bigger and calmer since 2019 mostly because the overall security situation eased, not because any one leader prayed harder than the last.
So here’s the plain version of all this: leaders who run a place this mixed serve everyone better by keeping their own worship private and putting their public hours into the boring, unglamorous work that actually changes lives. Standing at someone else’s altar, especially from the Chief Minister’s chair, doesn’t move that needle an inch. What moves it is hiring without favouritism, policing without bias, and giving every community in Jammu and Kashmir, displaced or not, the same quiet confidence that tomorrow will be fair.
The spring at Tulmulla will turn whatever colour it turns next week, same as it always has. The real question is for the people who’ve run this Union Territory, or who still hope to: are they going to keep showing up for rituals, or are they finally going to deliver the governance that makes rituals beside the point?
