Sidhu has claimed that Pakistan was waiting for India to respond to their ‘offer’ — but the reality is that there was no formal offer or official communication from Pakistan on the issue of the Kartarpur corridor.
But Sidhu being Sidhu, decided to undertake his own private foreign policy initiative with Pakistan which was aimed less at actually improving ties between the two countries and more at burnishing his credentials among the Sikh electorate in Punjab. In other words, his foreign policy initiative was a political enterprise to enhance his vote bank by raising an emotional issue like unfettered access to Sikh pilgrims the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan. In the process, Sidhu either didn’t understand or didn’t care how he was being used and exploited to service the sinister plan of Pakistan to re-ignite the flames of terrorism in Punjab by reviving the Khalistan movement.
How shallow Sidhu is can be made out from the fact that he quotes a tweet and a video interview of the Pakistan information minister who claimed that “Pakistan was willing to open the Kartarpur corridor and was waiting for India's formal affirmation.” What is the worth of this non-entity of an information minister who makes u-turns on his government’s policy on any number of issues on a daily, if not hourly, basis? Is Sidhu so vacuous and ignorant that he doesn’t know that on issues like Kartarpur and Khalistan, it is not some insignificant minister or even Prime Minister of Pakistan who calls the shots but the guys sitting in Rawalpindi and hatching plots against India? In any case, is the Indian government to react to Twitter messages on issues of high policy?
Sidhu has claimed that Pakistan was waiting for India to respond to their offer but the reality is that there was no formal offer or official communication from Pakistan on the issue of the ‘corridor’. What was there was a bait thrown, which Sidhu gladly swallowed, to try and open a political dialogue through the back door. He didn’t really care that by doing the Pakistani bidding he was undermining the position of the Indian government which has emphatically stated that there can be no political engagement with Pakistan unless Pakistan takes demonstrable action against the terrorists based in that country and stops the export of terrorism into India. The Pakistanis had earlier tried this tack with the Afghans while negotiating the Afghan Transit Trade agreement. To a demand of the Afghans to allow Indian goods to move overland from Wagah, the Pakistanis, trying to be too clever by half, told the Afghans to ask the Indians to talk to them about opening this route. Unlike Sidhu who adopted a cavalier and careless attitude to his own country’s sensitivities, the Afghans refused to fall for the Pakistani gameplan and told their Pakistani interlocutors to buzz off.
The Kartarpur corridor gambit has been tried before as well by the Pakistanis. In 1999-2000 when the Pakistanis were trying very hard to revive the Khalistan movement, they set up the Pakistan Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee and appoint one of the most rabid, bigoted, prejudiced and jihadist generals, former ISI chief Javed Nasir as its chairman. And guess who appointed him? The man the useful idiots in India thought was the best bet for normalising relations — Nawaz Sharif. Javed Nasir continued to stay the PGPC chief even after Nawaz was ousted in a coup in October 1999. In 2000 he announced that the regime of Gen. Musharraf had “given the green signal for constructing a 1.5 km-long corridor along the Indo-Pakistan border connecting Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib as proposed by the Auqaf Board where Sikh devotees will be able to visit without a passport/visa”. Only the most purblind would take this offer on face value and think that this was out of the goodness of the heart of the Pakistani ‘deep state’.
The proposal at that time didn’t take off, perhaps because the Pakistanis didn’t find a Sidhu to push their agenda. In 2010 under the PPP government the Pakistanis once again announced that they were ready for talks with India for establishment of a corridor and providing safe passage to Indian Sikh devotees to visit Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib. Then in 2013 the Nawaz Sharif government once again claimed that it had proposed to India to build a bridge to connect the Gurdwara in Kartarpur with the Dera Baba Nanak Gurdwara. But no one ever heard what happened to this proposal. Therefore, it is nothing short of ludicrous for Sidhu to act as though he was on the cusp of making a major breakthrough because of his friendship with the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan.
At a time when the Pakistanis are working double-time to revive the Khalistan movement, what with things like Referendum 2020, the political class in Punjab needs to tread with extreme care on emotional religious issues and not play the Pakistani game like Sidhu has done. But rather than step back from this needless controversy, another of his party colleagues, Pratap Singh Bajwa, has gone a step further and proposed an exchange of territory to get the Kartarpur Gurdwara. Given the dubious record of the Congress party in setting fire to Punjab in the 1980s for their political gains, questions naturally arise on whether the Grand Old Party of India is once again fishing in troubled waters. While Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has distanced himself from Sidhu’s shenanigans, perhaps the time has come for the Congress High Command to also disavow the comedian.
This commentary originally appeared on Mail Today.
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Sushant Sareen is Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation. His published works include: Balochistan: Forgotten War, Forsaken People (Monograph, 2017) Corridor Calculus: China-Pakistan Economic Corridor & China’s comprador ...
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