New Delhi: “India has reached the Moon, G20 meetings are held there…And we are going country to country asking for a billion dollars. What is left of our dignity, even in their eyes,” a visibly agitated Nawaz Sharif asked party workers during a virtual meeting of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz office bearers in September.
A month later, Sharif (73) returned to Pakistan, marking the end of his self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom. The three-time prime minister has since reiterated his stance on normalisation of ties and trade with India, as also his opinion that despite their differences, Pakistan must look at what India or Bangladesh, for that matter, have achieved in terms of economic gains.
“Our neighbours have reached the Moon but we haven’t even risen from the ground so far,” he told PML-N cadres in Islamabad just this week. India, the United States and Afghanistan aren’t responsible for Pakistan’s economic woes, Sharif added. “We shot ourselves in the foot.”
Of all the elected leaders Pakistan has had over the last seven decades, Sharif has projected himself as being the most dovish on India. Starting from Chandra Shekhar in 1990 and Narasimha Rao after him, the former businessman has dealt with five Indian prime ministers including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi.
On what a fourth term for Sharif could mean for the deadlock in India-Pakistan ties, political scientist and author Ayesha Siddiqa told ThePrint: “It is important to note that he [Sharif] is a product of the [Pakistan] military itself. He was brought to political life by the military.”
In 1988, after being elected Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto invited Rajiv Gandhi to Pakistan and started a dialogue on nuclear negotiations, Siddiqa added. “He [Sharif] was the one taking a pro-Kashmir position. By 1990, he began to challenge the military. His thinking on India gradually evolved.”
Owing to political differences between the PML-N and the Pakistan People’s Party (then led by Bhutto) Sharif, in the 1990s, adopted a “Centrist, pro-military policy on Kashmir and India”
He had realised, like Bhutto, that he couldn’t get the Pakistan Army off his back till he found a solution to the India problem. “That also meant solving the Kashmir issue, and therefore what we see is that in 1999, a major shift is then apparent when he invites Vajpayee [reference to the Lahore bus ride],” said Siddiqa.
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Tracing Nawaz Sharif’s India policy
Nawaz Sharif’s first interaction with an Indian counterpart was a little over a month after taking over as prime minister in November 1990, when he met then-PM of India Chandra Shekhar at a summit of regional nations in Maldives. As a report in The New York Times put it: “In separate interviews afterward, each men [sic] said he had been favorably impressed with the other’s determination to improve relations.”
Three years later, in 1993, Pakistan’s then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed Sharif’s government citing allegations of corruption and mismanagement. But like Pakistan, its elected leaders too have nine lives.
Sharif returned to power in 1997, after which he doubled down on efforts to seek rapprochement with India. This, coupled with Vajpayee’s prowess as a statesman, culminated in the historic bus ride to Lahore in February 1999.
However, the peace process screeched to a halt yet again after Sharif was ousted in a military coup led by General Pervez Musharraf later that year.
Speaking at an event organised by the South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA) in 2011, Sharif had said: “When he [Vajpayee] came, it was a historic day for Pakistan and Hindustan. Upon his arrival, he expressed a desire [for peace], and talked with sincerity. I was impressed by his truthfulness.”
At the same event, he described in some detail the bedrock of his India policy. “There is one border between us. We are members of the same society, share the same background, culture and even dishes and vegetables. Like you, we also eat aaloo gosht…Given all these things that are common between us, we must conduct trade with each other and develop our infrastructure, besides resolving long-standing issues.”
In his first address to the nation after returning to power in June 2013, Sharif emphasised that his government “wanted good relations with all neighbours including India, since the progress and development of a nation are deeply linked to cordial relations with neighbours.”
A year later, Sharif embarked on the first-ever visit by a Pakistani leader to India to attend the oath-taking ceremony of a prime minister-designate. Modi made an equally overt gesture by making a surprise visit to Lahore in 2015 to attend the wedding of Sharif’s granddaughter. Following the visit, Sharif even sent Modi a box of mangoes on the occasion of Eid.
Later that year, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, Sharif proposed a four-point “new peace initiative” to improve ties with India. The PML-N chief also reportedly told his closest aides around the same time to “encourage dialogue with India rather than digging up the past.”
In February 2017, he told reporters during a visit to Ankara, Turkey, that his party did not stoop to “India bashing” even during the latter’s 2013 election campaign. The two countries “should maintain good relations and avoid involving in conspiracies against each other,” he had said.
Later that year, his tenure was cut short, for a third time, after Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified him from holding public office for 10 years in light of allegations levelled against him in the Panama Papers. Sharif was subsequently convicted on corruption charges and was serving his sentence when he was allowed to travel to the UK for medical treatment in 2019.
He then spent four years in self-imposed exile in the UK before returning to Pakistan in October this year. Upon his return to Lahore, he told a massive crowd of supporters during his ‘homecoming’ jalsa at Minar-i-Pakistan that the country “cannot grow” if it “keeps fighting with its neighbours”.
“I believe in development, not in revenge,” he declared.
When asked how Sharif’s overtures to India may have affected his equation with the GHQ in Rawalpindi, Ayesha Siddiqa said that it was a “mistake” on Sharif’s part to “build direct links” with Modi, while the military establishment in Pakistan wanted to “control the initiative”.
Will Sharif’s praise of India’s economic growth and independent foreign policy hamper his party’s electoral prospects next year? She said it is not likely since “that sentiment echoes through the streets of Pakistan”.
The military leadership also understands that, Siddiqa added. “There’s nothing odd about it. Imran Khan also did it.”
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)