Pakistan blocks Sikh pilgrims travelling to Hemkund Sahib in India at Faisalabad airport

New Delhi: Pakistani authorities stopped a group of Sikh pilgrims at Faisalabad International Airport from travelling to India on Friday for the annual pilgrimage to Sri Hemkund Sahib, after seeking a no objection certificate (NOC) that the travellers said was not part of the requirements communicated to them. The development has left the pilgrims facing uncertainty at a time when an already complicated cross-border pilgrimage route has been made more difficult by restrictions on direct travel between the two countries.

According to a TOI report, the group, understood to comprise 104 pilgrims, had secured Indian visas and was scheduled to travel to India through Dubai, following Pakistan’s continued refusal to permit their entry through the Attari-Wagah land route. Earlier reports had established that the pilgrims were being forced to use third-country connections, adding substantially to the cost and complexity of a journey that would ordinarily have been considerably simpler by road.

At Faisalabad airport, however, the journey encountered another obstacle when Pakistani officials reportedly required the pilgrims to produce an NOC before allowing them to board their flight. The pilgrims maintained that no such document had been specified as a mandatory requirement for their travel, leaving the group stranded and highlighting the lack of clarity over the procedures governing religious travel to India.

The episode is significant because it comes after weeks of uncertainty over the same pilgrimage. On September 2, reports said Pakistan had declined requests by Sikh pilgrims for special permission to use the Attari-Wagah crossing, despite India having issued 104 visas for the Hemkund Sahib pilgrimage.

The refusal meant that pilgrims had to consider routes through countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Nepal or Oman before reaching Delhi. The jatha’s leader, Papinder Singh Wadera, told TOI that travelling through a third country could add about PKR 175,000 per passenger, a cost that had already prompted some families to reduce the number of members travelling and others to abandon the pilgrimage altogether.

The present dispute therefore cannot be viewed simply as an airport-level documentation problem. For the pilgrims, the sequence of restrictions has turned what should be a religious journey into a complicated exercise involving visas, international transit, additional expense and now questions over an NOC requirement at the point of departure.

The issue also sits within a broader deterioration in the ease of religious travel between India and Pakistan following the security tensions that led to restrictions on cross-border movement. At the same time, the movement of Sikh pilgrims has not stopped altogether: Indian Sikh groups travelled to Pakistan through the Wagah crossing in June for the Shaheedi Gurpurab observances, with Pakistan’s Evacuee Trust Property Board saying that around 600 pilgrims were received for the event.

That contrast has increasingly become part of the debate over reciprocal access for religious pilgrims. Former Rajya Sabha member Tarlochan Singh, for example, has urged Pakistan to reconsider the denial of land passage to Pakistani Sikh pilgrims travelling to India, pointing to the fact that Indian Sikh jathas have continued to use the Attari-Wagah route for visits to shrines in Pakistan.

The timing is also relevant because this year’s Hemkund Sahib pilgrimage season is already well advanced. More than 303,000 devotees had visited the high-altitude shrine in Uttarakhand by September 6, surpassing the previous annual record of 274,441 visitors set in 2025, with the pilgrimage season scheduled to continue until the shrine closes for winter in October.

For the Pakistani pilgrims, the immediate concern is whether the NOC issue can be resolved in time for their journey to proceed. For India-Pakistan relations, however, the episode raises a wider question: whether religious travel can continue to be insulated from the broader political and security relationship, or whether even routine pilgrimages will remain vulnerable to changing border rules and administrative decisions.

The latest development also underlines the importance of predictable procedures for religious travel. When pilgrims have already obtained visas and made international travel arrangements, introducing an additional requirement at the airport without clear advance communication can create uncertainty that extends well beyond the immediate inconvenience to the travellers.

For Sikh devotees in Pakistan seeking to visit Hemkund Sahib, the issue is particularly consequential because the shrine is accessible only during a limited annual season. Any prolonged delay therefore risks not merely disrupting a flight but effectively preventing pilgrims from completing the pilgrimage they had planned months in advance.