In which state/UT is the Hemis festival celebrated?

Correct — D. Hemis is a monastery in Ladakh, of the Drukpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and the festival takes its name from it.

The Hemis festival marks the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava, the teacher credited with carrying Buddhism into Tibet. It falls on the tenth day of a Tibetan lunar month, which in the Gregorian calendar lands in June or July.

Its centrepiece is the masked cham dance performed by the monastery's lamas → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Sikkim — Sikkim's Buddhist calendar runs on Losar, Saga Dawa and Pang Lhabsol, the last of these honouring Mount Khangchendzonga as the state's guardian deity. Hemis is not Sikkimese.
• (b)
  Punjab — Punjab's festivals are Baisakhi, Lohri and Hola Mohalla at Anandpur Sahib — an agricultural and Sikh calendar, with no Tibetan Buddhist monastic tradition behind it.
• (c)
  Lakshadweep — Lakshadweep is an overwhelmingly Muslim island territory in the Arabian Sea. Its observances are Islamic, and it has no monastery of the Hemis kind.

Festival questions reward one habit: fix the festival to its religious tradition first, and the state follows.

Hemis is Tibetan Buddhist and monastic, which places it in the Ladakh-Himalayan belt at once — the same belt that gives Losar and the cham masked dances.

Ladakh itself was separated from Jammu and Kashmir and became a Union Territory without a legislature on 31 October 2019, which is why the stem is careful to say 'state/UT'.

Key facts

• The Hemis festival is held at Hemis monastery in Ladakh.
• It commemorates the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava.
• Its central performance is the cham, a masked dance performed by monks.
• Ladakh became a Union Territory on 31 October 2019.

Common traps

• Catching the Buddhist cue and jumping to Sikkim, which keeps its own separate calendar.
• Ignoring the 'UT' in the stem and searching only among states.

No directly related past PYQ was found.