ABSTRACT
In November 2018, the governments of India and Pakistan agreed to develop the Kartarpur corridor linking the Sikhs’ two holiest shrines. The initiative is an important symbolic moment in the access to Sikh sacred spaces in Pakistan. This paper examines critically the efforts to control and manage this access since 1947. It assesses the policies of the two states to control access and reflects on the prospects for the Kartarpur corridor to become a ‘bridge of peace’. The Sikh case offers an unusual comparative case-study of closure of sacred spaces to a community in its ‘homeland’ and ‘holy land’.
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Acknowledgements
I should also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the referees, Prof. Arvind-pal S. Mandair, Prof Ian Talbot and Dr Tom Lyne.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Sacred spaces, according to Hassner (Citation2003, 5), are characterised by three functions:
they are places of communication with divinity through prayer, movement or visual contact with images of the divine; they are places of divine presence, often promising healing, success or salvation, and they provide meaning to the faithful for metaphorically reflecting the underlying order of the world.
2 The terms of reference of the Boundary Commission were agreed by the leaders of the Congress, Muslim League and the Sikhs. Initially, Mountbatten asked each to send him a draft. Nehru wrote to reject the involvement of the UNO, agreed to the principle of continuous majority Muslim and non-Muslim areas, and as a concession to the Sikhs, stipulated that it should ‘take into account other factors’ (Mansergh and Moon Citation1982, 239). At the Viceroy’s Executive Council meeting held on 13 June 1947 to confirm the terms of reference, Baldev Singh did not speak (Ibid., 382).
3 A simple search on Google of ‘Sikh pilgrimage tours to Pakistan’ generates a large number of sites based in Pakistan. Sikh Tourism, for example, claims
Today’s Pakistan is the cradle of the Sikh religion. We proudly claim that Guru Nanak Dev Ji was born in this part of the subcontinent, spent most of his time here … and have more than ninety per cent of the Sikh shrines in Pakistan.
4 For a discussion of the concept of sovereignty within the Sikh tradition, see Mandair (Citation2015).