Congress cautions govt over Kartarpur Corridor with Pakistan

The Congress Tuesday said it would not like to come in the way of the Kartarpur Corridor created by Pakistan to facilitate Sikh pilgrims from India to visit Gurdwaras across the border, but cautioned the Centre in dealing with the neighbouring country.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said the Kartarpur Corridor issue was "extremely sensitive" even as he said Pakistan had not acted against the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks even after a decade.

"Kartarpur corridor has been a long-standing demand of the Sikh community in Punjab and other places which goes back almost 25 years...if there is something happening on Kartarpur, we would not like to stand in the way but in our dealings with Pakistan, you have to be extremely careful and extremely calibrated," he told reporters.

"The difficulty with the NDA government has been that they have swung from sublime to the ridiculous in their policy towards Pakistan over the past 53 months," he said.

The 4-km-long Kartarpur Corridor will connect Dera Baba Nanak in India's Gurdaspur district with Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib Narowal in Pakistan. The corridor will provide visa-free access to the Indian Sikh pilgrims to the gurdwara.

Tewari also talked about the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and how the neighbouring country had failed to bring the perpetrators to book.

On November 26, 2008, Mumbai was attacked by 10

terrorists of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. In the mayhem

that followed for the next three days, 166 people, including 18 police officers and two NSG commandos, were killed while 308 people were injured.

"The fact remains that Pakistan has not acted against the perpetrators of 26/11. That is the reality that we must be cognizant about," he said.