India and Pakistan showed a rare sign of cooperation when the two countries decided to open on Saturday a secure visa-free corridor that will allow Sikhs to travel across the border. Thousands of Sikhs from around the world are expected to make the pilgrimage through the Kartarpur Corridor from India to a holy shrine in Pakistan.

The Gurudwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur is one of the holiest places in Sikhism. It is believed that the Gurudwara was established by the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, 500 years ago where he spent the last years of his life.

For centuries, Sikhs would freely travel between Kartarpur and the Golden Temple in Amritsar, another Sikh shrine in the state of Punjab. But the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 disrupted this centuries-old Sikh pilgrimage. Kartarpur went to Pakistan and Amritsar to India.

Kartarpur is located around four kilometers from the border with India, but due to ever-rising tensions between the two countries, Sikhs have found it difficult to travel. For many years, Sikhs from India have traveled to the India-Pakistan border and viewed the shrine in Kartarpur through binoculars. 

But that is now changing. In 2018, both India and Pakistan decided to build a corridor from the Indian border straight to the Gurudwara. The Kartarpur corridor is a nine-kilometer stretch between Dera Baba Sahib in India and Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan. The corridor is being opened just days before Guru Nanak's 550th birthday on November 12.

Pakistan will let around 5,000 Indian pilgrims visit Kartarpur every day. Indian pilgrims will be entitled to visa-free travel. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments have built their respective parts of the corridor in a rare show of cooperation.

Out of the total of 27 million Sikhs in the world, 22 million live in India and 20,000 in Pakistan. But despite agreement on this issue, analysts believe it is unlikely to ease tensions between the two countries due to deep divisions over Kashmir.