KHALISTAN EXTREMISM MONITOR
A project of the Institute for Conflict Management
A project of the Institute for Conflict Management
It was until recently in news that as many as eight domes, built only six months ago, over the shrine of Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak Dev, which lies in Kartarpur, a small town just 4km over the Pakistan side of the border, have been blown away during a thunderstorm. But the domes that were supposed to be made of concrete material were faked and made from plastic.
The contract for the hasty construction of the shrine that was in shambles was awarded to Frontier Works Organisation (FWO). It was not, until India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi whose government managed to pass a Bill last August that abrogated Article 370 - a controversial legislation that had granted special status to the region of Jammu and Kashmir - that Pakistani government woke up to the need to cater for Indian Sikh pilgrims to visit their holy place.
Pakistan's involvement in the separatist movement of Khalistan began around 1973, just two years after the birth of Bangladesh. A Canada-based columnist, Tarek Fateh recalls that he attended a press conference as a young reporter in Larkana, Sindh, at late Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's ancestral house. Fateh quotes Bhutto as saying that "Pakistan will also have a Bangladesh carved out of India, except that it will be within Pakistan's border."