The violent mob that attacked Nankana Sahib Gurdwara, the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev and then indulging into stone-pelting over the arrest of a few miscreants accused of abducting and converting a teenaged Sikh girl to Islam last September has fully exposed the false claims of Imran Khan on the plight of minorities in Pakistan. His foolish way of championing the cause of minorities in India and using an old video from another country as visual evidence of what he calls “pogroms” here, he conveniently forgot violations of minorities in his own backyard. He has been unable to protect them from genuine abuse and vandalism of their highest shrine on his home turf.
The attack completely jeopardises his initiative on the Kartarpur corridor to link Indian Sikhs to the Gurdwara. Most damaging for him, the hold-up of innocent pilgrims at the shrine has given grist to the Indian propaganda machinery about minority persecution in Pakistan and the need for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to rehabilitate them. Now the Modi Government doesn't need to conduct awareness drives on CAA, the siege of Nankana Sahib has been convincing enough with Khan dim-wittedly becoming its spokesman.
Pakistan has had a dismal track record as far as the treatment of minorities living there concerned, be it of Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Khalsis, Shias and Ahmadiyya Muslims and even Indian Muslims ‘Mohajirs' who migrated to that country at the time of the Partition. Over the last two decades, the population of Sikhs in Pakistan has come down from 40,000 in 2002 to a dismal 8,000 in 2019. But driven by an anti-India design, it did try to placate Sikhs worldwide with the Kartarpur corridor and by reviving the centrality of Nankana Sahib. So the vandalism of angry protesters over the weekend was the proverbial spanner in the works. Not only have many Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) generals, including the former chief Hamid Gul, openly supported the Khalistan movement, several officers have also been acting as handlers and organisers of Sikh separatist activities in Canada, Europe, the US, the UK and Malaysia.
In fact, shedding all pretensions, during the opening of the Kartarpur corridor, Pakistan's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had released a music video displaying posters of Khalistani separatist leaders in the background. But reports of forced conversions and the dwindling Sikh population in Pakistan have exposed Khan's duplicity. Unable to drum up much support at the UNGA after the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, he now stands even more exposed and ridiculed. Hopefully, Sikhs across the world will see through Pakistan's nefarious design for what it really is.
