Kartarpur Corridor Opens

Four kilometres

Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur stands where Guru Nanak farmed, taught and died — the place the first Sikh community was actually built. Partition left it about four kilometres inside Pakistan.

From the Indian side, at Dera Baba Nanak, it is visible across the fields. For decades Sikhs travelled to a viewing platform on the border to look at it through binoculars, and the Indian authorities eventually installed a telescope. The shrine was near enough to see and required a visa, a flight and a security clearance to reach.

The opening

The corridor opened on 9 November 2019, timed to the 550th anniversary of Guru Nanak’s birth, under an agreement signed on 24 October that year.^1,2

The terms are genuinely unusual for this border: Indian pilgrims of any faith may cross without a visa, for the day, year-round, with the agreement providing for up to 5,000 people daily.¹ Pakistan charges a service fee per pilgrim; India charges nothing. The arrangement was renewed in October 2024 for a further five years.²

It closed in March 2020 for the pandemic and reopened in November 2021. It has since stayed open through diplomatic crises that shut nearly every other channel between the two countries — an exception both governments have chosen to preserve.³

Why it mattered more than its size

Four kilometres of road is a small piece of infrastructure to generate the reaction this did. The reason is that it is the only place where Partition has been partly undone.

Everything else about 1947 is settled and irreversible: the population moved, the villages emptied, the shrines were left. Nankana Sahib, the birthplace, still requires a visa. What the corridor did was restore one specific act — walking to Kartarpur — to something a Sikh in Indian Punjab can simply decide to do on a given morning.

What is worth being clear-eyed about. The motives on both sides were not purely devotional. Pakistan’s interest includes religious tourism revenue and the diplomatic value of the gesture; India’s includes domestic politics in Punjab. Sikhs in Pakistan remain a very small and sometimes vulnerable minority, and the corridor does not change that.⁴ None of this makes the thing less real for the people who use it.

For a community whose founder taught that pilgrimage sites are worth less than honest living, the pull of this particular ground is worth noticing — and it is not really about the ground. It is that the border has been closed for so long that opening a footpath across it counts as news.