Around 2,800 Indian Sikh pilgrims crossed the Attari-Wagah border into Pakistan this week to attend Baisakhi festivities at Gurdwara Panja Sahib, one of the faith's most sacred shrines, in what has become one of the largest annual religious gatherings in the country. The event underscores how spiritual ties can persist even as diplomatic relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours remain deeply strained.

Baisakhi, observed each April, commemorates the founding of the Khalsa — the collective body of initiated Sikhs — by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699. It combines the significance of a spring harvest festival with a powerful expression of Sikh religious identity. For many devotees, the pilgrimage to Pakistan carries profound personal meaning: some of Sikhism's holiest sites, including Panja Sahib in Hasan Abdal, Nankana Sahib — the birthplace of Sikhism's founder, Guru Nanak — and Kartarpur Sahib, all lie within present-day Pakistan, a consequence of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent.

The pilgrimage is made possible by a 1974 bilateral protocol between India and Pakistan that grants citizens of each country access to shared religious sites across the border. Despite recurring episodes of conflict, border closures and diplomatic freezes that have characterised relations between the two countries, this framework has remained largely intact, enabling a steady if modest flow of religious exchange year after year. Authorities on both sides coordinate security arrangements and logistics to facilitate the visits.

Why this matters: in a relationship defined more often by hostility than cooperation, the annual Baisakhi pilgrimage represents one of the few functioning channels of people-to-people contact between India and Pakistan. It offers a rare example of institutional cooperation enduring through political turbulence, and serves as a reminder that shared heritage can outlast the borders drawn to divide it. For the Sikh community worldwide, whose historical homeland of Punjab was split between the two countries, the ability to access these shrines carries both spiritual and symbolic weight that transcends geopolitics.