On the eve of the 23rd summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) held on Oct. 15-16, 2024, in Islamabad, Pakistan, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif gave an interview with an Indian journalist on the future of Pakistan-India relations. Sharif does not hold any official position in the federal government where his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif is the prime minister. His daughter, Maryam Nawaz, is the chief minister of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, which shares a long land border with India.

For some reason, the interview venue was not Sharif’s Jati Umra residence but his daughter’s chief minister's house in Lahore. In the interview conducted by Indian journalist Barkha Dutt, Sharif said: "I have always been a supporter of good relations with India. I hope that there is an opportunity to revive our relationship. It would have been great if Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi had also attended the SCO summit. I do hope that he and we will have an opportunity to sit together in the future."

This is not the first time that Sharif has spoken about his vision of normalizing relations with India, which went sour after India annexed the Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 when the Indian People's Party (BJP) government of Modi abrogated Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that granted Kashmir a special status.

Pakistan’s then government, headed by Imran Khan, responded by taking the position that it would not resume bilateral dialogue with India until the annexation of Kashmir is undone, an unrealistic wish on the part of Pakistan, after it could not prevent the change in the status of Indian, occupied Kashmir both diplomatically, and through a show of military strength.

In response, India launched a diplomatic salvo against Pakistan, accusing it of sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. Covertly, it continued to destabilize Pakistan through the terrorist outfits of the Balochistan Liberation Army and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which have a nasty record of attacking army and police convoys and killing innocent civilians in their terror campaign against Pakistan. However, the propaganda of India carried greater weight as it caught the attention of the international partners of India, which found a parallel with India’s close friend Israel, who also calls a Muslim Iran and the axis of resistance in the Middle East terrorists.

Sharif's efforts for peace

In May 2024, Sharif said that what happened after the Lahore Declaration in February 1999 was a betrayal of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s trust built after his visit to Pakistan on Sharif’s invitation. Vajpayee’s visit to Lahore was undermined by the then Pakistani military high command with the launch of the Kargil war in July 1999 without seeking Sharif’s approval. Later, in October 1999, Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf overthrew Sharif in a bloodless military coup. Last year, Sharif said: "India had reached the moon, while Pakistan was at the opposite spectrum. It was Pakistan to blame for its own crisis."

Sharif has been consistent in his vision of India-Pakistan relations for the last four decades. In a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral, he expressed similar views on the margins of the Commonwealth Edinburgh Summit 1997. After the Kargil war, the establishment punished Sharif for his India view by removing him from office in a military coup.

In 2017, Sharif said that democratically elected leaders were not free to make political decisions in Pakistan. The infamous "Dawn Leaks" not only resulted in his disqualification as prime minister by the judiciary but also deprived his political party, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), of victory in the 2018 general election due to the establishment’s decision to replace the racehorse, which did not win the Derby either.

In the 2024 general election, although Sharif’s political party could form a coalition government in the center with the help of other political parties, he could not muster enough support to become prime minister for the fourth time and settled for his younger brother to take this office.

Is a reset of relations possible?

It is hard to say whether the Pakistan establishment has finally come around to accepting Sharif’s view on India and whether his statement was intended to coincide with the arrival of the Indian foreign minister to Islamabad to attend the SCO summit. Suppose it was cleared by the establishment and was an attempt to evaluate India’s response. In that case, it can be said that it took 25 years for the establishment to realize what is possible and doable for Pakistan within the scope of resetting its bilateral relations with India.

It is also hard to say whether India would take this statement as a signal from Islamabad to move forward and reciprocate the gesture beyond showing media interest. In the past, Sharif was punished by the establishment for saying "I love India" when he was prime minister in 1999, as well as in 2017. There is no assurance that the establishment will embrace Sharif’s view now that he does not hold any important position in government and will make it on its own. Restoring credibility in international relations takes decades; a breach of trust, on the other hand, takes a small error of judgment, let alone a war, as happened in 1999.

The timing for normalization, however, can never be more fitting. In Pakistan, a civilian-led government has full support for the military establishment. An agreement negotiated with the current government is like negotiating with the establishment, requiring no further endorsement from any other power center.

Likewise, the timing also suits India as it needs to rediscover its place in South Asia. India has lost its goodwill in Bangladesh following a botched election of January 2024 and the resulting people’s revolution in August 2024, forcing former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee to India. During her authoritarian rule, she had made Bangladesh a vassal state of India through her "India-first" policy. India has also lost influence in the Maldives and Afghanistan. The Indo-Iran gas pipeline has also been held up due to U.S. sanctions against Iran. The Modi government realizes that it is not enough to have friendships with the U.S., the U.K. and the EU while being isolated in its own region.

A rapprochement of relations with Pakistan could revive South Asian cooperation, revitalize the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and unleash opportunities for India for regional investment and tourism. It is a bilateral opportunity for mutual gains for both countries with little risks involved.

Benefits for Pakistan

Having a belligerent India as a neighbor has not helped Pakistan except to create a competitive spirit in a few important fields such as nuclear deterrent, conventional defense, arts, literature and sports, but with no matching performance in manufacturing, technology, agriculture, health and education. The extraordinarily long war on terror in Afghanistan, which was not Pakistan’s war in the first place, dragged Pakistan unwillingly into it and wasted two decades to concentrate on its economic development.

The annexation of Indian-occupied Kashmir in August 2019 by India would not have happened had the normalization of bilateral relations been on course. The sound and fury only response of Pakistan to India’s annexation in 2019 proved that Pakistan could neither fight a winnable war with India to force India to settle the Kashmir dispute nor gather international support to condemn India for annexing a disputed territory in the Indian Union and changing its demographics through settlements and elections.

The war in Gaza has shown that if a war takes place between India and Pakistan, the latter will be all alone in the world to fight it and sustain it. No one comes to support you in a war unless there is a strong alliance such as that exists between the U.S. Evangelical Bible Belt and Israel’s right-wing Zionist radicals. No one wins a war. It is only the dead you count after explosions have stopped over a wasteland.

So, what would be on the cards if Sharif’s view became the official view of Pakistan? It points to an agreement between the two countries that legitimizes the status quo; namely, India keeps what it has in occupied Kashmir and Pakistan keeps what it has in Azad Kashmir, as well as Gilgit Baltistan, which India calls a disputed territory dating back to Maharaja’s Hari Singh’s reign, and then the two countries move on to establish good neighborly relations with the long territorial dispute peacefully settled and out of the way.

If the Kashmiris feel that they have been betrayed by Pakistan for making a settlement with India over their heads, then they should realize that they have never been clear about joining Pakistan as part of the federation. Their freedom movement has always hovered around a sovereign independent Kashmir, which they never denied. The name of their largest party, Hurriyat, is evidence of their ambition. Therefore, if they want independence from India like the Sikhs and Assamese, then let them continue with it without involving Pakistan.

If Pakistan is stable and strong, it will have a pull factor like a magnet for others to come and reinforce its foundations, but if it is divided and broken, everyone will want to pack up and move away. With so much water under the bridge over this bilateral vision, Sharif’s point has weight and substance. Until it meets a counterargument of a similar level, it remains on the table as the best option so far for the two countries to embrace and run with it before the moist green olive branch dries out for another dry spell.