Pervez Musharraf – the man who waged war and then talked about peace

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf passed away in Dubai, after a prolonged illness.

G Parthasarathy, Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan during 1999-2000, the year when the Kargil war took place, remembers meeting Pervez Musharraf several times during his tenure. “He was a Mohajir army chief where Punjabis have traditionally dominated. He was courteous at a personal level, but I stopped meeting him once the Kargil conflict began and dealt only with the government,” the former diplomat told Moneycontrol.

Of the military dictators and populist politicians, who ruled Pakistan, none can escape the culpability of damaging long-term relations with India more than General Pervez Musharraf.

Just when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee extended the most generous offer of an olive branch extended by an Indian head of state to permanently estranged Pakistan by taking the historic bus ride to Lahore in February 1999, the men from New Delhi were yet to reckon with the Pakistan Army’s enfant terrible, Pervez Musharraf, who passed away in Dubai on February 5.

When it seemed that two traditional foes were about to bury their four-decade-old hatchet and look towards a brighter future, Musharraf planned the most ambitious and reckless Kargil operation aimed to capture unmanned winter peaks and vandalise what appeared like a changing geo-strategic scenario in south Asia.

In the hindsight, it would be fair to assume that Pakistan’s botched Kargil operations were the harbinger of an unstable south Asia from which the sub-continent has never quite recovered.

American diplomat Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, likened this historic initiative by Vajpayee to that of Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1971 and Gorbachev’s opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The level of the Musharraf-led subterfuge was enormous. Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had welcomed Vajpayee to Lahore, told PTI in 2006 that he learnt of the Kargil incursion through an urgent call from Vajpayee in May 1999.

Almost all the Pakistani corps commanders were unaware of the “ill-conceived, ill-planned and ill-executed misadventure of army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf,” Sharif said and added, “just two or three of his cronies knew.”

Through the Kargil operations, Musharraf, then chief of army staff, had ‘sabotaged’ the understanding reached by him with Vajpayee at Lahore to resolve all Indo-Pakistan troubles, including Kashmir, Sharif claimed.

Subsequent Pakistani accounts confirmed what Nawaz Sharif, who was removed in a coup by Musharraf post-Kargil in October 1999, had explained.

The Kargil operation was the brainchild of Musharraf and a couple of his cohorts, and when the Indian Army with assistance from the Indian Air Force descended upon the icy heights in Kargil like a tonne of bricks in May 1999, it was left to Nawaz Sharif to rush to the US seeking ‘intervention’ in the matter.

Among the charges against the former Pakistan president, the most credible one came from Pakistan’s former Lt Gen Shahid Aziz, who alleged that Musharraf had kept other commanders in the dark about his Kargil operations. Aziz headed the analysis wing of the ISI during the conflict.

He revealed that the Kargil operation was masterminded by a group of four generals led by the late president. Aziz also alleged that details of the operation were hidden from other military commanders and the exact number of Pakistani casualties was still unknown.

Reacting to the charges, Musharraf retorted: “Telling everyone about it was not necessary at all.”

It would also not be inaccurate to say that the kind of overtures that India made to this Delhi-born Pakistani dictator shall remain unprecedented, either in the past or in the foreseeable future.

Despite the Kargil fiasco and the hostility of the Pakistani army, Vajpayee invited Musharraf to the Agra peace talks in 2001. Those talks were also doomed to fail.

In 2006, Vajpayee for the first time explained what went wrong in Agra meet. “At Agra, he (president Musharraf) took a stand that violence that was taking place in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as terrorism. He continued to claim that the bloodshed in the state was nothing but the people’s battle for freedom,’’ Vajpayee said.

“It was this stand of Gen Musharraf that India just could not accept. And this was responsible for the failure of the Agra summit,” the former PM added.

However, the spin doctors attached to the Musharraf entourage launched a propaganda blitz and blamed the ‘hardline’ sections in the Vajpayee administration – read LK Advani – behind the failure of talks. The theme was brought up again by Musharraf in his autobiography, In the Line of Fire, released in 2006.

Vajpayee was not the only one, who was unamused by this account. “By inviting General Musharraf to the Agra summit, India conferred legitimacy on him,” said Sharif, adding, “To me, it amounted to recognising a military dictator although his rule is still unconstitutional, unlawful, and immoral. Why should you talk to a man like that?”

A miffed Sharif saw Musharraf as a “very impulsive man, erratic in behaviour and not a very stable person.”

Musharraf, however, remained unrepentant throughout his life. He claimed that the 1999 Kargil operation was a “big success militarily”. The former Pakistan president in 2013 said that if then PM Nawaz Sharif had not visited the US, the Pakistani Army would have “conquered” 300 square miles of India.

“We lost the Kargil war, which was a big success militarily, because of (then premier) Nawaz Sharif... If he had not visited the US, we would have conquered 300 square miles of India,” Musharraf told Pakistan’s Express News channel.

He also justified Pakistani casualties in the conflict and claimed that Pakistan lost only 270 men against 1,600 Indian soldiers, a figure not confirmed by any country or agency.

Former Indian ambassador Deepak Vohra places Musharraf’s visceral hatred towards India on his failure to prevent Pakistan from taking Siachen in 1984 when he was a brigade commander.

“Musharraf tried twice to retake Siachen but was thwarted. His was a case of revenge against India. Hours before his coup when he upstaged Nawaz Sharif in 1999, Musharraf refused to land in India when his aircraft ran out of fuel, endangering the lives of other passengers,” Vohra told Moneycontrol.

At Agra, Musharraf reportedly came up with his four-point formula for peace in Kashmir.

“It is important that military forces on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) are kept to the minimum, it is imperative that the people of Jammu and Kashmir on either side of the LoC should be able to move freely from one side to the other, it is important to ensure self-governance for internal management in all areas on the same basis on both sides of the LoC, and Jammu and Kashmir can with the active encouragement of the governments of India and Pakistan work out a cooperative and consultative mechanism to maximise the gains of cooperation in solving problems of social and economic development of the region,” his proposals read.

Reactions to his peace formula remained mixed.

Also read: Pervez Musharraf scripted Kargil but also came close to resolving Kashmir issue

According to high commissioner Parthasarathy, these were the most serious peace proposals on Jammu and Kashmir ever brought forward by anyone in Pakistan and pretty much reached fruition.

Former Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) India, Lt Gen (retired) Vinod Bhatia, told Moneycontrol that post-Kargil, Musharraf became aware of the futility of waging wars against India and conjured up his four-point formula, which came too late in the day, and was neither liked much in India nor Pakistan.

Also read: General Pervez Musharraf: A tragic figure who failed to earn his nation’s respect, despite intensely yearning for it

After deposing Sharif, Musharraf became President of Pakistan in 2001 and remained Army Chief till 2007. He quit in 2008 to avoid impeachment and emigrated to London in a self-imposed exile.

He returned to Pakistan in 2013 to participate in the general election held that year but was disqualified from participating after the country’s courts issued arrest warrants for him for his alleged involvement in the assassinations of Nawab Akbar Bugti and Benazir Bhutto.

After his re-election in 2013, Sharif initiated high treason charges against the former Pakistan Army chief for implementing an emergency and suspending the Constitution in 2007. The case against Musharraf continued after Sharif’s removal from office in 2017, the same year in which Musharraf was declared an ‘absconder’ in the Bhutto assassination case as he had moved to Dubai.

Ambassador Vohra remembers that balmy evening in London in 2012 when he came face to face with Musharraf at a reception. “I asked him point blank why he had waged Kargil?” What he got by way of a reply was a straight deadpan.