During the May 2013 election campaign, Nawaz Sharif declared it was time to improve ties between New Delhi and Islamabad. Following his victory, an informal meeting between Sharif and Manmohan Singh — on the sidelines of the 68th session of the UN General Assembly in September 2013 — helped resume the dialogue process that had stalled after fierce exchanges of fire across the Line of Control (LoC) in August 2013. Since then, several meetings have taken place between officials and leaders of the two sides.

This was not the first time as prime minister that Sharif looked to develop a new dialogue with India. It was 15 years ago that he and India’s then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee signed the ‘Lahore Declaration’ during their two-day summit in Lahore. The Lahore Declaration was signed on February 21, 1999 and it committed India and Pakistan to an unprecedented set of nuclear Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) that remain in place to this day. At the same time, they agreed to accelerate the secret backchannel they had established after an earlier face-to-face meeting to resolve the seemingly intractable dispute over Kashmir.

The trust-building process, however, came to a halt in May 1999 when Pakistani forces intruded across the LoC in the Kargil area, triggering the most intense military conflict since the 1971 war. “I had gone to Lahore with a message of goodwill,” reflected Vajpayee, “but in return we got Kargil.” Despite this, the Indian leader never publicly accused the Pakistani leader of betraying him, but the collapse of the Lahore peace process into a war that threatened to escalate to higher levels of violence, including nuclear, poses the question as to how far Nawaz Sharif should be held responsible for what happened in Kargil.

There are three possible interpretations of Sharif’s role in the Kargil episode. The first is Musharraf’s claim that ‘everybody was on board’ and the prime minister was briefed several times on the operation, which was being planned whilst Sharif was shaking Vajpayee’s hand in Lahore. The second interpretation is Sharif’s, which is diametrically opposed to Musharraf’s recollection. Sharif claims that he was unaware of Musharraf’s plans. The third interpretation seeks to chart a path between these two extremes.

Support for Sharif’s view comes from Pakistan’s Track II negotiator, Niaz A Naik, who stated publicly that India and Pakistan had been close to reaching an agreement over Kashmir when the Kargil crisis intervened, and that Sharif knew nothing about the operation. This perspective receives further support from some knowledgeable sources that maintain that even the naval and air chiefs were not taken into confidence by Musharraf. The first time that Musharraf disclosed Kargil’s details to them was sometime in mid to late May 1999 at a meeting in the office of the director general military operations. One conclusion that might be drawn here is that if standard military procedures were compromised for the sake of secrecy, then it is likely that the civilian government was also kept in the dark.

This perspective on Kargil explains the collapse of the peace process as arising from the military’s discomfort with a negotiated settlement over Kashmir that precluded Pakistan’s takeover of the disputed territory. While this argument cannot be discounted, reliable sources confirm that when the naval chief questioned Musharraf about the political objective of his campaign at the above-mentioned meeting, Musharraf was “flummoxed” and had no clear answer. His later emphasis on internationalising the Kashmir issue through Kargil is claimed by some to be an afterthought.

Moreover, Musharraf is said to have nurtured this idea since 1988 to 1989 and it is claimed that the Pakistani military was engaged in preparations for Kargil even before the two prime ministers met in Lahore. The newfound nuclear status of Pakistan is likely to have fuelled the desire to make sub-conventional gains in Kashmir. This perspective perceives Kargil in purely military terms — as primarily a tit-for-tat for the Indian forces’ secret occupation of the Siachen heights in 1984.

Another explanation does see a political motive but one that has to do with civil-military relations in Pakistan. The eighth amendment, empowering the president to dissolve the National Assembly, was introduced by Ziaul Haq in 1985. It was invoked more than once by pro-military presidents during the 1990s to dismiss the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif prematurely. Capitalising on an overwhelming majority in parliament in his second term, Sharif did away with the controversial constitutional amendment in 1997. Gaining in confidence, Sharif then took issue with then Chief of Army Staff General Jahangir Karamat over the latter’s statement on the need for a National Security Council, leading to Karamat’s resignation in October 1998. This unprecedented event, according to inside sources, generated resentment in the army and Sharif was increasingly seen as getting too big for his boots. Add to this Musharraf’s self-image as a macho death-defying commando on a mission to save Pakistan, and Kargil becomes a means to destabilise the civilian set-up and pave the way for a military takeover. In short, both of these arguments uphold the second interpretation and exonerate Sharif of deliberate deception.

The proponents of the third interpretation argue that Sharif was not entirely unaware of the army’s strategy of ‘raising the temperature’ in Kashmir. They maintain that in a March 1999 meeting at the ISI headquarters, Sharif received selective information and agreed that the military could increase the level of insurgent activity in Kashmir as a way of putting pressure on India to make concessions. This was not a new strategy and the chances are that Sharif did not suspect an operation on the scale of Kargil; he categorically denies he was ever told of the deployment of Northern Light Infantry (NLI) troops.

It is also possible that Sharif knew about Kargil but he took the risk in the belief that the action would not derail the Lahore peace process given the personal investment of both him and Vajpayee in it. If so, this showed an astonishing lack of empathy for the position of Vajpayee and the constraints on any Indian leader facing a military incursion across the LoC.

That said, there is an argument that the Indian leadership should have been better attuned to the need to ensure that Sharif had something concrete to show the military on Kashmir. Sharif had made a key concession at the Lahore Summit by agreeing to delink progress on Kashmir from agreement on nuclear CSBMs. Indeed, an official from India’s external affairs ministry reflected after Kargil, “Sharif took a risk for better relations, but we did not reciprocate with concessions over Kashmir. He had nothing to show for it to a sceptical army.”

That Vajpayee never blamed Nawaz Sharif publicly for the Kargil episode is perhaps the most important argument in Sharif’s favour. The 15th anniversary of the Lahore Summit and Declaration then is a reminder that trust can be built, even between the leaders of enemy powers. In the case of Vajpayee and Sharif, their trusting relationship had grown prior to Lahore, crucially through their face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 1998. The two days spent together in Lahore then made possible the achievements of the summit. With Sharif back in the driving seat, it is an opportunity for Pakistani and Indian leaders to rediscover the ‘spirit of Lahore’ and settle outstanding disputes that have bedevilled bilateral relations for more than six decades.

Dr Talat Farooq can be contacted at talatfarooq11@gmail.com and Professor Nicholas J Wheeler can be contacted at www.Birmingham.ac.uk/iccs; n.j.wheeler@bham.ac.uk