Many members of the Sikh community in India visited the final resting place of the religion’s founder, Guru Nanak, at Kartarpur in Pakistan for the first time since Partition, after the announcement of the Kartarpur corridor initiative between the two countries. The inauguration of the project on November 28 gives a new lease of hope to diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan.
The proposed corridor would be 4 km long on Indian territory — from Gurdaspur to Pathankot — and 3 km onward to Kartarpur in Pakistan’s Narowal district, including a stretch over the river Ravi.
Guru Nanak spent his final 18 years preaching and farming at Kartarpur village. The gurdwara that came up here following his death in 1539 was destroyed by floods in subsequent years. It was in the 1920s that the erstwhile maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, the grandfather of current Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, reconstructed the Kartarpur gurudwara.
In 1999, the then prime ministers of the two countries, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, briefly discussed opening a corridor to Kartarpur. But no progress was made until another Indian PM, Manmohan Singh, spoke to Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, under whom the building underwent a renovation. However, Kartarpur Sahib remained inaccessible to Indian pilgrims.
Finally, in August this year, during the swearing-in of the newly-elected Pakistani PM Imran Khan, India’s Congress party leader Navjot Singh Sidhu and Pakistan’s chief-of-army staff Qamar Javed Bajwa spoke about the corridor. Imran Khan also told an Indian journalist at a press conference, “…the only way forward is peace.”
Ahead of the corridor’s inauguration, timed to coincide with Guru Nanak’s 549th birth anniversary, the first contingent of pilgrims arrived at Kartarpur on November 26. Over 3,800 pilgrims came from all over the world, including Canada, the UK and Russia, for the historical event.
Some of the pilgrims, who had come from Amritsar, said they had never expected to visit the holy shrine in their lifetime. It was a giant leap for many Indian devotees who could, until that day, only glimpse the revered religious site through a telescope on the border. The corridor is scheduled to be completed before Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary in November 2019.
Shome Basu is a New-Delhi based freelance photographer