Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh will meet the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to seek a passport waiver and simplification of the process for visiting the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara.
Singh will lead an all-party delegation to the PM to discuss the issue. He will also urge PM Modi to pressurize Pakistan to slash the $20 fee on Indian pilgrims.
The Punjab government had unanimously passed a resolution in Vidhan Sabha on Tuesday.
Moving the resolution, Punjab Cooperation Minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa said after the Kartarpur corridor opened on November 9, 2019, after decades of prayers by the Nanak Naam Leva Sangat, the corridor’s history would be written in golden letters.
Chief Minister intervened the MLA Gurpartap Singh Wadala on his suggestion that the state government should take up these issues with the Centre, and asked him to simultaneously take up this issue with Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal in order to prepare the ground for early resolution.
The resolution also said that there are many who intend to visit the gurdwara but they don’t have a passport, as a result of which many devotees are not going for ‘darshan’.
Apart from this, devotees are facing a lot of hardships due to the difficult process of online registration.
The House strongly recommended to the Punjab government to take up these issues with the Union government so that they could take it up with Pakistan and ask them to “remove the condition of passport and, in lieu of it, other documents like Aadhar card should be permitted for identification”.