DEHRADUN: Despite the ban on Kanwar yatra this year, scores of pilgrims in plain clothes are trying to enter Haridwar to collect Ganga water, prompting authorities to deploy 28 special buses at eight railway stations to send them back. On Monday alone, 240 Shiva devotees trying to enter Uttarakhand illegally were ferried out of state borders on special buses and trains.
“The devotees have ditched their saffron attire this time and are wearing plain clothes so it is harder to identify them. We’ve now started checking details of each passenger exiting the railway station, such as RT-PCR test report and address proof, to identify the yatris. We were able to identify 240 such passengers and sent them back on Monday,” said Manoj Katyal, additional superintendent of government railway police (Haridwar).
Some pilgrims were sent back to state borders in buses while others were sent home on trains such as Mussoorie Special, Amritsar Special and Howrah Special. The railways are also distributing pamphlets and making announcements at stations about cancellation of Kanwar yatra.
Meanwhile, six pilgrims from Rajasthan and Gujarat who had arrived to take a dip in Ganga were found Covid positive during testing at the Haridwar railway station and sent to a Covid care facility in the district hospital. “We conducted over 800 tests on Monday and six pilgrims tested positive,” said station house officer (GRP Haridwar Railway station) Anuj Singh.
On Sunday, 14 kanwarias from Haryana’s Sonipat were detained by Haridwar Police and booked under the Disaster Management Act. They were quarantined at the state's Prem Nagar ashram facility. Two locals caught selling items to kanwarias were also booked.
More than 1,000 police personnel have been deployed on different inter-state border points to stop the movement of kanwarias. Additional police pickets have come up at Purkazi, Morna, Khanpur and Sikandarpur areas along the Uttarakhand-UP border.
(Inputs by MS Nawaz)
