Sikhs in Pakistan

Almost the entire Sikh population of west Punjab left in 1947. The Sikh community in Pakistan today is small, generally estimated in the low tens of thousands, and a large part of it is from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region and the tribal areas rather than from Punjab.

Many of those families came from Tirah and Orakzai and moved to Punjab after 2009 when the security situation in the tribal areas deteriorated. They are Pashto-speaking Sikhs.

The Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee was formed in 1999 to manage the shrines under the Evacuee Trust Property Board.

The Sikh Marriage Act was passed in Pakistani Punjab in 2018, giving Sikh marriages legal registration for the first time.

The community is at Nankana Sahib, Lahore, Peshawar and Hasan Abdal, and it maintains the sites that hundreds of thousands of Indian Sikhs would visit if they could.

Nankana Sahib is the destination of the largest annual pilgrimage from India, arranged under a protocol on religious visits agreed in 1974.

The Kartarpur Corridor opened in November 2019, a visa free crossing from Dera Baba Nanak to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur where Guru Nanak Dev Ji spent his last years, with a bridge over the Ravi and a terminal on each side. It is the only crossing of its kind on that border.

Punjabi in Pakistan is written in Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi is taught in no school there, so a Sikh child learns the script the scripture is in separately or does not learn it. The community runs its own classes where it can and the classes depend on whoever is willing to take them.

What we don't know

  • The size of the Sikh population in Pakistan, which the census undercounts and community bodies dispute.

Where to check this

  1. Pakistan census data on religious minorities. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗
  2. Punjab Sikh Anand Karaj Marriage Act, 2018. India Code - full text of central and state legislation ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Reporting on the Pashtun Sikh community.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 69 accounts in The Crossing, the chapter of this site covering 1947 and what it did.