Union minister Vijay Sampla on Tuesday expressed doubts over Pakistan’s commitment towards building the Kartarpur corridor and said the country might use it to push militants into India, PTI reported.
“We fear that militants will come from there [Pakistan]... it is well known that Pakistan supplies terrorism throughout the world,” Sampla told reporters in Chandigarh. “Therefore, we are concerned about our country.”
The minister of state for social justice and empowerment claimed Pakistan was using Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu as a “weapon to attack India” and criticised Sidhu for praising Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan at the groundbreaking ceremony in Lahore on November 28. He claimed that Sidhu’s “aggressive behaviour” would damage Punjab’s long-term interests.
“Pakistan now has a weapon named Sidhu, which it is using fully. And we are being used,” said Sampla. “In the future, we will have to face a lot of damage because of it.”
Sidhu in Lahore had thanked Khan for making the corridor possible. “The seed Imran Khan had sown three months ago has become a plant,” the Congress leader had said.
The Kartarpur corridor will connect Dera Baba Nanak in India’s Punjab with the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur area of Pakistan’s Narowal district, where the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, died in 1539.
Sampla said certain statements by Pakistan ministers have created stumbling blocks in the corridor’s construction, referring to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s comments that Pakistan had bowled a “googly” to ensure India’s presence at the ceremony. Union ministers Harsimrat Kaur Badal and Hardeep Singh Puri, along with Sidhu, had attended the event.
Qureshi later claimed that the remark had been misinterpreted.
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