Recently, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made this extraordinary claim while campaigning in Rajasthan, ‘My destiny has been to fix Congress’ wrongs…We should ask them, why they let Kartarpur go to Pakistan at the time of Partition’. Is wilful ignorance of history the reason for this grandiloquent and malevolent assertion or are lessons in geography the need of the hour for the prime minister?

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The first Guru of Sikhs, Guru Nanak, founded Kartarpur in 1504 CE on the right bank of the Ravi River and established the first Sikh commune there. Following his death in 1539, Hindus and Muslims both claimed him as their own and raised mausoleums in his memory. The changing course of the Ravi River eventually washed away the mausoleums, but the sons of Guru Nanak managed to save the urn containing his ashes and reburied it on the left bank of the river Ravi, where a new habitation was formed, representing the present day Dera Baba Nanak, a town in the district of Gurdaspur, in India. The vagaries of the course of the river, and the horrific events of 1947 then rent asunder two of the most important places of pilgrimage to the Sikh community: Kartarpur Sahib, in Pakistan, and Dera Baba Nanak in India. The much talked about Kartarpur Corridor is an attempt to bridge this forced parting of ways.

To get to Kartarpur, we need to get to Gurdaspur and for that we need to get on the Radcliffe Line. The Indian Express’ The pilgrims’ long route had this to say: ‘Had Gurdaspur district not been awarded to India by the Radcliffe Award, the angst of losing Kartarpur would perhaps have been less since it would have been located deep inside Pakistan’. This narrative gets even more difficult when the epic struggle for owning the princely state of Kashmir gets yoked to it.