Sacred Sites Across the Border: India-Pakistan and the Regulation of Cross-Border Religious Travel

Abstract

This paper traces how India and Pakistan have regulated cross-border religious travel over the decades. The Ahmadiyya and Sikh communities are used as foils for a broader analysis of how religious groups separated from their sacred sites by the Partition responded to the loss and attempted to influence the state/s to ensure that their sites were adequately maintained and pushed for permission to travel to them. The paper then examines the negotiations that occurred between India and Pakistan to enable religious travel and the mechanisms and protocols established to regulate this. The regulation of religious travel mirrored the twists and turns of diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan, and the attempts by both states to regulate and control cross-border travel.