The move to build the Kartarpur Corridor has the potential to undo the “freeze” in ties between India and Pakistan and push the two sides to engage in a positive and purposeful manner, the Pakistani media commented on Thursday.
The planned corridor will connect Sikh faith’s founder Guru Nanak Dev’s final resting place in Pakistan’s Kartarpur to the Dera Baba Nanak shrine in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district in India, fulfilling a long-pending demand of the Sikh community.
It took more than 70 years for Pakistan and India to bridge a distance roughly 7 kilometres on either side of their border, the Express Tribune said in its editorial, a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan laid the foundation stone of the corridor on the Pakistani side.
The initiative to build a corridor connecting two Sikh holy sites Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur in Pakistan and Dera Baba Nanak in India came from the Pakistan side, it claimed.
As proposed, the Indian government will construct and develop the Kartarpur corridor from Dera Baba Nanak in Indian Punjab’s Gurdaspur district to the border, while Pakistan will build the other part of the corridor connecting the border to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur area of Narowal district in Pakistani Punjab.
“The Kartarpur development comes at a time of no dialogue and little contact between Pakistan and India,” the daily said.
“A meaningful confidence-building measure, the move has the potential to undo this bilateral freeze and push the two sides to engage in a positive and purposeful manner,” it said.
