Split by partition, Indian man gets Pakistan visa to meet brother

Sika and Siddique will finally be able to spend a few days together – almost seven-and-a-half decades after the 1947 partition of India and birth of the new nation of Pakistan separated the two brothers.

The High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi has issued a visa to Sika Khan so that the 76-year-old can travel from Punjab in India to the neighbouring country, where his 84-year-old brother Muhammad Siddique has been living since 1947.

“I am delighted that I have got the visa. I will now travel to Pakistan to meet my brother and other family members,” Sika said in a video tweeted by the High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi, after a brief meeting with the neighbouring country’s acting envoy to India, Aftab Hasan Khan. He also smilingly posed for photograph showing on his passport the visa that would allow him to spend a few days with his brother Siddique.

The siblings were separated just days before India attained independence and Pakistan was born as a new nation in August 1947.

The children were at their maternal village Phulewala in Punjab just days before India attained independence on August 15, 1947. So were their parents. But just before the partition of the country, their father took Siddique to his ancestral village Bogran, which soon became the part of Punjab in Pakistan.

Sika, then just two-year-old, remained with her mother in India. As the partition triggered a mass migration and communal riots, the family’s plan for an early reunion did not turn into a reality. The father of Sika and Siddique died in Pakistan, while their mother committed suicide a few days after hearing about her husband’s death across the newly drawn border.

The two brothers grew up and greyed separately on two sides of the border.

They, however, came to know about each other in 2019 when Pakistani YouTuber Nasir Dhillon visited the village where Siddique was living and posted online a video of him talking about his long lost sibling Sika. A rural medical practitioner Jagsir Singh from Phulewala in India contacted Dhillon and they arranged a video-call between the two separated brothers.

Sika and Siddique met each other personally in Kartarpur Corridor a few days back.

The “Kartarpur Corridor” was formally opened in November 2019 to facilitate the pilgrims from India to cross over to Pakistan and visit the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur without any hassle.

The meeting between Sika and Siddique in Kartarpur Corridor was brief.

But with Sika now set to travel from India to Pakistan and meet Siddique, the two siblings can at least partially make up for the years they lost while growing up on the two sides of the border.

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