Going across

Travel between India and Pakistan requires a visa that is issued for named cities, requires police reporting on arrival in most categories, and is refused far more often than granted.

For Punjabis this means that a journey of fifty kilometres from Amritsar to Lahore is administratively harder than a journey to Canada, and takes longer to arrange.

Pilgrimage under the 1974 protocol is the main exception: four jathas a year, with agreed numbers, to named shrines. Demand consistently exceeds the allocation by a wide margin.

The Kartarpur corridor, opened in 2019, is the only visa-free arrangement and it covers one shrine, one day, and a fee.

The effect on knowledge is direct. Almost no Indian Punjabi historian has worked in the Lahore archives and almost no Pakistani Punjabi historian has worked in the Patiala ones, which is why there is no history of Punjab written from both sides of its own record.

That is a solvable problem that neither state has any interest in solving.

There is no tourist visa between the two countries. The categories are visits to relatives, business, pilgrimage and official travel, so a Punjabi who simply wants to walk around Lahore has no category to apply under.

The religious pilgrimage protocol of 1974 provides for parties to visit named shrines on named occasions, and those parties are how most people who cross do it.

A family divided in 1947 that wanted to meet has to do it in a third country or not at all. The two halves are fifty kilometres apart and the trip is effectively impossible.

What we don't know

  • Nothing central.

Where to check this

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

  • Indian and Pakistani visa regulations.
  • 1974 Protocol on Visits to Religious Shrines.

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.