Pilgrims at Wagah crossing, tension on the border: Why India should be wary of Pakistan’s gesture | Explained

Indian Sikh pilgrims queue at the India-Pakistan Wagah border in Wagah on November 4, 2025, for their visit to Pakistan to pay their respects on the eve of celebrations marking the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism. (Photo by Narinder NANU / AFP)

Hundreds of Sikh pilgrims on Tuesday queued at the Indian side of the Wagah-Attari crossing and began moving into Pakistan to attend the 556th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak. The movement marked the first major crossing since the intense clashes in May that saw missile, drone and artillery exchanges between India and Pakistan and forced the closure of general land traffic at the Wagah frontier. The episode is being presented by Pakistan as a humanitarian gesture and a sign of interfaith outreach.

Numbers, logistics and official lines

Reports indicate that the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi issued over 2,100 visas to Sikh pilgrims for the November 4 to 13 festivities. Business Standard reported that a jatha of 1,796 pilgrims was scheduled to enter Pakistan via the Attari-Wagah border on November 5 and that many pilgrims expressed gratitude to the Indian government for permitting the visit. One pilgrim told reporters, “We thank the government for giving permission to do darshan.” Another pilgrim, Harpreet Singh, thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and urged that “The visa procedure should be simple so that more people can go.” These figures and on-the-ground reporting confirm that the movement was substantial and carefully processed by both sides.

Pakistan’s diplomatic statement framed the decision as part of “inter-religious and inter-cultural harmony and understanding.” The Pakistani High Commission posted on X that it “has issued over 2,100 visas to Sikh pilgrims from India to participate in the Birth Celebrations of Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji, to be held in Pakistan from 04-13 November 2025.” That phrasing is the official Pakistani line and it is designed to highlight goodwill while downplaying the context of cross-border hostilities.

The strategic context: goodwill amid confrontation

This pilgrimage is not taking place in a vacuum. It follows the four days of violent exchanges in May -- the worst since 1999. The conflict resulted in more than 70 deaths in missile, drone and artillery strikes, and it closed the Wagah-Attari land crossing to ordinary traffic. The Kartarpur Corridor, the visa free route opened in 2019, remains closed since the conflict began. Those facts matter because they mean Pakistan’s gesture is both limited and selective. Allowing a controlled number of pilgrims to cross while the broader border and corridors remain shut looks like a carefully managed public relations exercise rather than a genuine lowering of tensions.

From India’s perspective, the selective reopening serves multiple Pakistani objectives. It offers Islamabad an image of magnanimity on the international stage. It creates optics of normalcy at a time when Pakistan is politically and militarily engaged in hostile acts. And crucially, it allows Islamabad to control who crosses, when they cross and where they are taken. In a tense environment, those levers give Pakistan disproportionate influence over narratives and over the safety and monitoring of pilgrims once they are inside Pakistan. India has to treat such “goodwill” as conditional and instrumentally deployed.

Security and consular concerns

There are immediate practical considerations for India. First, the safety and welfare of Indian pilgrims inside Pakistan must be actively monitored. Given the closure of the Kartarpur Corridor and the ongoing operational risk in border areas, New Delhi needs clear, verifiable assurances about movement and access to sacred sites such as Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur, and about emergency repatriation arrangements. Second, the concentrated movement of pilgrims can be exploited by hostile actors for propaganda or recruitment if authorities do not maintain tight oversight. Third, the selective permission model opens the door for reciprocal claims by Pakistan about normalisation even as cross border military tensions remain unresolved.

The political optics and regional signalling

Islamabad is using this pilgrimage to shape international perceptions. By emphasising religious outreach it seeks to separate public diplomacy from its recent escalatory military posture. That separation will not hold for long in New Delhi’s calculation. For India, the pilgrimage is an example of how Pakistan can mix conciliatory gestures with aggressive military behaviour and thereby attempt to fracture international and domestic narratives about who is the destabiliser.

Pakistan’s decision to receive pilgrims with flowers and rose petals, and to broadcast visa tallies, is aimed at both domestic and global audiences. In Islamabad’s telling it is the magnanimous neighbour offering spiritual hospitality. In New Delhi’s reading it is a tactical move to keep Pakistan in the moral spotlight while avoiding accountability for the preceding strikes and for transborder provocations that sparked the May escalation.