On Sunday a door on Lahore’s Temple Road opened that had been shut for 79 years. The Gurdwara Chhevin Patshahi Sri Guru Hargobind Sahib in Mozang, shut since 1947, was reopened for worship after a full restoration, with prayers said in the Sikh tradition and the community’s leaders in attendance. It is a small building on a busy road, and a large moment for the city. Pakistan has done a fine thing here. The task now is to make sure it is not a one-day ceremony but the start of a habit: holy places restored, kept open, used, and easy for pilgrims to reach.
The shrine is named for Guru Hargobind, the sixth of the Sikh gurus, which is what Chhevin Patshahi“The Sixth Master”: a name Sikhs use for Guru Hargobind, the sixth guru. Many gurdwaras linked to him carry it. means, and Sikh tradition ties the site to his time in Lahore. The ceremony was organised jointly by the Evacuee Trust Property BoardThe federal body that manages the temples, gurdwaras and other properties left behind by Hindus and Sikhs who migrated to India in 1947., the Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and the Punjab government. Ramesh Singh Arora, the Punjab minister for minorities and the committee’s president, told the gathering that restoration work is now under way at more than 50 gurdwaras across the country, and credited the drive to Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz.
Mr Arora is Pakistan’s first Sikh provincial minister. When he speaks of 50 gurdwaras, he is speaking for a community that has kept faith with this land through every hard decade since 1947, and for millions of Sikhs abroad for whom Lahore, Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur are not foreign places but the heart of their history.
A Lahore gurdwara returns to worship
Lahore is, for Sikhs, a city of the gurus. Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth guru, was martyred here, and Gurdwara Dera SahibThe gurdwara beside the Lahore Fort and the Badshahi Mosque that marks the place of Guru Arjan Dev’s martyrdom in 1606. Visiting pilgrims stay there., beside the Fort, marks the spot. Maharaja Ranjit Singh ruled his empire from this city and lies in a samadhi a few steps away. Every spring and every autumn, buses of pilgrims roll through its streets on their way to Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, and back again.
Yet much of the city’s Sikh heritage spent the decades after Partition behind locked gates. Some buildings were turned to other uses. Others simply aged, with no congregation left to care for them. The Temple Road gurdwara was one of these. Its reopening is the kind of quiet repair that rarely makes headlines, and should.
Pakistan does not always get credit for this work, but the record is real. In the Punjab and beyond, the state has spent money and effort bringing old places of worship back to life. In October 2024 the Evacuee Trust Property Board began rebuilding the Baoli Sahib temple in Narowal, closed since 1960, so that the district’s Hindus would once again have a temple of their own. In 2019 Gurdwara Choa Sahib in Jhelum, built in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s time beside the Rohtas Fort, and the Shawala Teja Singh temple in Sialkot were both opened to worshippers for the first time in 72 years. Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak spent his final years, was given a corridor and a renovated complex in 2019 that Sikhs around the world regard as one of the most generous gestures any government in this region has made to a minority faith.
The Temple Road shrine belongs to that same tradition. It also carries a lesson. Restoring a building is the easy half. A gurdwara with a congregation is a living thing; a gurdwara with only a caretaker is a monument. What matters now is whether the doors stay open on an ordinary Tuesday, whether there is a granthiThe reader and custodian of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture, who leads the daily prayers at a gurdwara. to read from the scripture each morning, whether the langar kitchen is lit, and whether local Sikh families and visitors from abroad know the place exists.
“A gurdwara with a congregation is a living thing. A gurdwara with only a caretaker is a monument.”
Pakistan’s open door to Sikh pilgrims
On the question of access, Pakistan’s position has been consistent and generous. The Foreign Office said on Friday that in 2025 Pakistan issued 9,318 visas to religious pilgrims from India, 9,070 of them to Sikhs and 248 to Hindus, and another 4,002 to Sikh pilgrims in the first half of this year. These visas are issued under the 1974 protocolThe 1974 agreement between Pakistan and India on visits to religious shrines, which sets out how groups of pilgrims from each country can visit holy sites in the other. on visits to religious shrines, and they kept coming through a year in which the two countries fought a four-day conflict and cut most other contact.
Pilgrim visas Pakistan issued to Indians
Visas under the 1974 protocol on visits to religious shrines. Figures given by the Foreign Office spokesperson on November 7, 2026. Bars scaled to the 2025 Sikh total.
Last November, when relations were at their coldest in years, Pakistan still issued visas to more than 2,100 Indian Sikhs for Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary, and about 2,000 of them walked across at Wagah on the eve of the festival, the first large crossing since the May conflict. They were received by Pakistani officials and taken on to Nankana Sahib, and many spoke afterwards of a warm welcome. That is what a confident country looks like.
Later this month Nankana Sahib will mark the 557th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, and preparations are already under way. Pakistan should treat it as a showcase: visas issued early and in generous numbers, a smooth crossing at Wagah, clean and safe lodging, and a route that lets pilgrims see not only Nankana and Kartarpur but places like the newly reopened Temple Road gurdwara. A jathaA group of Sikh pilgrims travelling together, usually organised by a Sikh body, as most Indian pilgrims to Pakistan do. that spends an extra afternoon in Mozang goes home with one more reason to come back.
The Kartarpur corridor, open on one side
There is one door Pakistan cannot open on its own. The Kartarpur corridorThe visa-free route, opened in November 2019, that lets pilgrims from India cross to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Narowal, and return the same day., opened under a 2019 agreement, allows up to 5,000 pilgrims a day to visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib without a visa and return home the same evening. India has suspended pilgrim movement through it since May 7, 2025. Pakistan’s side has stayed ready, and the Foreign Office said again last week that pilgrims will be welcomed the moment the restrictions are lifted.
Group visas under the 1974 protocol, for the main festivals. Pakistan issued 9,070 such visas to Sikh pilgrims in 2025.
The 2019 corridor: about five kilometres, up to 5,000 pilgrims a day, home the same evening.
The corridor, opened and closed
The logic of India’s position is hard to find. It allowed more than 2,100 pilgrims to travel through Wagah last November, so it does not argue that pilgrimage to Pakistan is unsafe. What it has closed is the one route that requires no visa, no long journey to Lahore and no overnight stay, and that ends a few kilometres from its own border. As Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesman put it, there is little justification for letting 9,000 Sikhs cross at Wagah while stopping them from visiting Kartarpur for the day.
The people who pay for the closure are not diplomats. They are elderly Sikhs in Gurdaspur and Amritsar for whom a visa application, a bus to Wagah and a week away from home is too much, and for whom a morning’s walk across a bridge was the pilgrimage of a lifetime. Even at its busiest the corridor rarely carried anything like its daily limit, because Indian pilgrims needed a passport and police clearance. But the point of it was never the numbers. It was that a Sikh farmer could pray where Guru Nanak prayed and be home for dinner.
This newspaper understands that New Delhi has its own politics. But the case for reopening is one that many in India itself are making. Bhagwant Mann, the chief minister of Indian Punjab, has called for the corridor to reopen and said he would like every member of his assembly to visit Kartarpur. Pakistan’s Foreign Office has said it would consider a visa for him to attend the World Punjabi Conference in Lahore later this month. Its spokesperson put the principle simply: “Anyone who wishes to practise their religion and visit their religious sites anywhere in the world should be allowed to do so.”
That principle should carry the day. Reopening the corridor in time for the gurpurab would cost India nothing in security and would earn it a great deal of goodwill among its own Sikh citizens. Keeping it shut tells them that their faith is being held hostage to a quarrel that has nothing to do with them. Pakistan has kept its side ready. It should keep saying so, calmly and often, and keep the welcome mat out.
“The point of the corridor was never the numbers. It was that a Sikh farmer could pray where Guru Nanak prayed and be home for dinner.”
What Pakistan should do next for Sikh heritage
The more useful conversation is about what Pakistan can do on its own, because there is a great deal. Start with the 50 gurdwaras Mr Arora spoke of. The Evacuee Trust Property Board should publish the list: which sites, what work is being done, what it costs, and when each will open. Sikhs abroad follow this closely and would gladly help, with money, with craftsmen and with conservation advice, if they could see a plan.
Second, every restored gurdwara needs a budget for the years after the ribbon is cut. Restoration grants are easy to announce; upkeep is where heritage quietly dies. A small endowment for each site, paying for a granthi, a caretaker, electricity and repairs, would cost little and protect a great deal. Where a local Sikh congregation exists, it should be given a real say in how the building is run.
Third, make the journey easier. The 1974 protocol works, but it is a narrow channel built for a different era. Pakistan should make it as simple as possible for Sikhs from Britain, Canada, the United States and elsewhere to visit through its online visa system, with clear information in Punjabi and English, and should look again at fees, permits and paperwork for pilgrims at festival time. The goal should be a pilgrim who arrives thinking of the shrine, not the forms.
Fourth, think of religious tourism as the economic asset it is. Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur, Dera Sahib in Lahore, Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal and now Temple Road form a pilgrimage circuit that few countries can match. Add the Hindu temples at Katas Raj and the Buddhist heritage of Taxila and Takht-i-Bahi, and Pakistan holds some of the most sacred ground of three great faiths. Decent hotels near the shrines, trained guides, heritage walks through old Lahore and reliable transport between the sites would bring visitors, jobs and goodwill in equal measure.
Fifth, do not forget the Hindu heritage. The 248 Hindu pilgrims of 2025 are a fraction of what the country could welcome, and Pakistan’s own Hindu citizens deserve temples that are open, safe and cared for. The Baoli Sahib rebuilding in Narowal showed what can be done. Temples closed for decades deserve the same attention the gurdwaras are now getting.
A city that remembers
None of this is charity. It is Pakistan being true to itself. The country’s founder promised its minorities that they would be free to go to their temples and places of worship, and the Constitution guarantees it. A restored gurdwara on Temple Road is that promise in brick and marble, and every pilgrim who walks through its door carries the message home: Pakistan keeps faith with its history, all of it.
Lahore has always been a city of many faiths. Its temples, gurdwaras, churches and mosques sit within walking distance of one another, and its old families remember neighbours of every creed. The reopening in Mozang is a reminder of that older Lahore and an invitation to build on it. Keep the door open. Keep the lamp lit. And when the pilgrims come later this month for Guru Nanak’s birthday, let them find a country that is glad to see them. Pakistan has opened its doors. India should open its gate.
