PURI: As many as 120 Hindu pilgrims from Pakistan visited Sri Jagannath temple here on Saturday. They arrived in Puri on the invitation of Odisha International Centre. The delegation will leave for Varanasi on Sunday, one of the members said, adding that they had left Pakistan on December 27. They had been to Mathura before reaching here.
“It was a long-cherished desire to have ‘darshan’ of Lord Jagannath. We got the visa with much difficulty. We thank the Indian Government for facilitating our visit,” said a pilgrim from Pakistan. Another woman visitor said, “I prayed before the Lord that the relation between India and Pakistan gets normalised so that we can get visa easily to visit Puri and offer prayers to the deities.”