Negotiate land swap with Pak for Kartarpur shrine: Harsimrat to PM

Harsimrat urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take up the proposal for a land swap between India and Pakistan for merger of the holy shrine at Kartarpur Sahib with India in exchange for a suitable chunk of land elsewhere on the lines of Hussainiwala village

Former Union minister and SAD leader Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Tuesday demanded re-opening of Kartarpur Corridor.

SAD leader Harsimrat Kaur Badal.

She urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene and take up the proposal for a land swap between India and Pakistan for merger of the holy shrine at Kartarpur Sahib with India in exchange for a suitable chunk of land elsewhere on the lines of Hussainiwala village.

She urged the PM to take the diplomatic initiative for the creation of a “permanent peace corridor” to link the sacred shrines in Pakistan to the border.

In her two-page letter, the member of Parliament from Bathinda recalled that a proposal for the land swap to merge Kartarpur Sahib with India was mooted by the SAD in 1948.

“In 1969, the then prime minister agreed to formally approach the Pakistan government for exchange of land on the pattern that the two countries had earlier done for martyrdom place of Shaheed Bhagat Singh as well as between India and Bangladesh with regard to the Farakka Dam,” she said in the letter.

However, the proposal was turned down by both the Pakistan government and the then Congress government in Punjab. She said the issue came up for discussion again during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Lahore bus trip and his meetings with his Pak counterpart, Nawaz Sharif. She adds that the proposal was initiated at the behest of the then Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badal.