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

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.