In June, the 39th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee will meet in Bonn, Germany, to determine new additions to the list of World Heritage Sites. India already has 32 such sites, and 47 more from the country that were added to the “Tentative List” over the past two decades will be considered by the committee this year.
Of those 47, arguably the most iconic, and certainly the most visited, is Amritsar’s Sri Harmandir Sahib, the holiest site in Sikhism that is known to most non-Sikhs as the Golden Temple. The nomination and selection of World Heritage Sites is generally the subject of little controversy. But the prospect of the Golden Temple’s selection has caused great alarm among sections of the Sikh community. A change.org petition, submitted by a Sikh student in Belgium and calling on UNESCO to delete Harmandir Sahib from the tentative list, has got more than 12,000 signatures.
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