Kartarpur Corridor

A bridge, currently closed

The most important fact about the Kartarpur Corridor as of late 2025 is not that it opened — it is that it is closed. Since Operation Sindoor in May 2025, authorities have suspended the corridor’s operations “till further orders” on security grounds. The bilateral agreement governing it has been extended until 2029, but there is no clarity on when pilgrims will again walk the path; for now, would-be visitors to Darbar Sahib must travel via the Attari-Wagah border and apply for a visa — reimposing exactly the barriers the corridor had removed.

That makes it easy to forget how improbable the corridor was. It links the Indian town of Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district to the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan’s Narowal district, less than five kilometres away — a shrine stranded on the far side of the 1947 Partition because the Ravi river’s course placed it in Pakistan. For more than seventy years, Indian pilgrims climbed a rickety watch-post at the last border point and viewed the gurdwara through a telescope. The shrine fell into disuse: the Sikh population of Pakistan dwindled, and access was rough compared with Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace.

The shrine at the end of the road

The three-storey gurdwara’s spiritual weight is enormous. Guru Nanak spent the last eighteen years of his life here and died here in 1539. The organised langar — the communal kitchen where rich and poor of all faiths cook, serve, and eat together, a defining Sikh tradition — is believed to have started at Kartarpur. The shrine holds one of the last copies of the original Guru Granth Sahib; in 1860 the visiting British dignitary Lady Canning described the Granth in her journal as a thick quarto-sized book in a peculiar character and language. And according to legend, the original gurdwara by the river housed both a Hindu samadhi and a Muslim grave of Nanak — a final gesture uniting followers of both faiths.

Born through a crisis

The corridor’s opening on 9 November 2019, on Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary, happened despite a near-conflict breaking out around it. A February 2019 suicide bombing killed 40 CRPF soldiers in Pulwama; India struck Balakot; Pakistan counter-struck along the Line of Control; and months later the Article 370 amendment triggered a Pakistani diplomatic freeze — recalled high commissioners, severed trade, closed airspace. Modi and Imran Khan nonetheless persevered, and the first group of 550 Indian pilgrims crossed over. Pilgrims needed no visa, just registration on the Indian side for a day visit. The Hindu called it “a rare peacetime, pilgrim corridor” — most international human corridors exist for disasters, conflicts, or refugees, not for faith.

The symbolism was deliberate: Modi likened the opening to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh led an all-party delegation across on inauguration day. The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, visited in February 2020 and called it a “corridor of hope.” The numbers were immediate: nearly 45,000 Indians and Overseas Citizens of India visited in the first two months, averaging about 500 a day. Pakistan was willing to raise capacity to 10,000 a day at a $20 entrance fee; India capped each traveller at ₹11,000 and a 7 kg bag. The inauguration itself was marred by the presence of Khalistani separatist elements, which New Delhi protested — a reminder that the corridor always sat on a security fault line.

Within four months of opening, COVID-19 shut the corridor in March 2020; it reopened on 17 November 2021 ahead of Guru Nanak’s 552nd birth anniversary. It has since become the template for other proposals — Sindh’s tourism minister suggested a Kartarpur-like corridor for Hindu and Jain pilgrims visiting Umarkot Shiv Mandir, one of Pakistan’s oldest temples.

What this profile does not claim

It does not predict when — or whether — the corridor reopens; the 2029 agreement extension is a legal framework, not a reopening commitment. It does not repeat the 2019 operating terms (the $20 fee, the ₹11,000 and 7 kg caps) as current policy, and it does not examine Operation Sindoor itself, which is beyond this profile’s scope.