Nawaz Sharif admits Pakistan violated Lahore agreement signed with India in 1999
Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s former prime minister, said on Tuesday that the country had “violated” the 1999 Lahore Declaration pact with India, which he and then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee signed. Indirectly pointing to the Kargil misadventure by Gen Pervez Musharraf, he said, “It was our fault.”
“On May 28, 1998, Pakistan carried out five nuclear tests. After that, Vajpayee Saheb came here and made an agreement with us. But we violated that agreement…it was our fault,” Sharif told a meeting of his party Pakistan Muslim League (N).
The Lahore Declaration
The Lahore Declaration, a peace treaty signed by the two warring neighbors on February 21, 1999, aimed for maintaining peace and security as well as increasing people-to-people communication. However, a few months later, Pakistani incursion into the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir triggered the Kargil War.
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Beginning in March 1999, Musharraf, the Pakistan Army’s four-star general, authorized the secret infiltration of forces into the Kargil district of Ladakh. After New Delhi uncovered the infiltration, a full-scale war broke out, which India won while Sharif was Prime Minister.
A clip from Nawaz Sharif’s speech, broadcast by the state-owned Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV), has gone popular on social media.
Case against me, which led to my removal from PM office in 2017, was false: Sharif
As Pakistan commemorated the 26th anniversary of its first nuclear test today, Sharif stated, “President Bill Clinton offered Pakistan USD 5 billion to prevent it from conducting nuclear testing, but I declined. Had (previous Prime Minister) Imran Khan been in my shoes, he would have embraced Clinton’s offer.”
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“I ask Imran not to blame us [of being patronised by the army] and tell whether [former ISI chief] Gen Zahirul Islam had talked about bringing the PTI [Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf ] into power,” he said while addressing PML(N)’s general council meeting.
He also mentioned a message from the ISI chief to quit as Prime Minister in 2014, saying, “When I refused, he threatened to make an example of me.”
Sharif was re-elected “unopposed” as President of the ruling PML-N party on Tuesday, six years after he was forced to resign due to a Supreme Court decision in the Panama Papers case.
