“Please ask him to visit Delhi,’ former foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Kasuri, suggested when he came to know I was meeting former Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, the next day. Kasuri, who is chairman of the Lahore-based Institute of Peace and Connectivity (IPAC), felt, ‘He can break the ice.’

I did convey Kasuri’s request to Sharif. He listened carefully, before responding with a benign, non-committal smile. In the past, as head of government, he would connect with India much to the chagrin of the omnipotent Pakistan Army; and in fact, paid a price for it. Now that his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif – who is reputed to have a better equation with the army - is in the saddle, Nawaz will only take an initiative if Shahbaz and the army are in conformity with it.

“Please ask him to visit Delhi,’ former foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Kasuri, suggested when he came to know I was meeting former Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, the next day. Kasuri, who is chairman of the Lahore-based Institute of Peace and Connectivity (IPAC), felt, ‘He can break the ice.’

I did convey Kasuri’s request to Sharif. He listened carefully, before responding with a benign, non-committal smile. In the past, as head of government, he would connect with India much to the chagrin of the omnipotent Pakistan Army; and in fact, paid a price for it. Now that his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif – who is reputed to have a better equation with the army - is in the saddle, Nawaz will only take an initiative if Shahbaz and the army are in conformity with it.

An hour south of Lahore, a mere 50 kilometres as the crow flies from Amritsar, lies the leafy, rural setting of Raiwind. Here in one of several quite expansive farm houses lives Nawaz Sharif, 74, the only Pakistani with the distinction of thrice being elected his country’s prime minister.

He didn’t complete his full tenure in any; not because he lost the confidence of his party the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz or of the directly-elected National Assembly. Such has been Pakistan’s turbulent history since its breakaway from India and birth in 1947.

Winding through alluring and sprawling farmland and orchards my car approached Sharif’s residence. Walking towards it from the opposite side with a retinue of people in tow was the man himself in his customary Pathan-style shalwar kameez, and wearing a facemask reminiscent of covid times. It could well have been a scene out of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather; except that the central figure wasn’t a don of a Sicilian clan, but a president of a political party, where in addition to one of his siblings being prime minister, his daughter Maryam Nawaz is the chief minister of Pakistan’s most powerful province - Punjab.

‘What a pity there are no direct flights between Pakistan and India,’ Sharif ruefully remarked after we had settled down in a drawing room. His disappointment was genuine. He has, to be fair, been a consistent proponent of better relations India – to the extent of including it in his party’s general election manifestos. His aides would advise against it; but he would persist - to prove that the Pakistani masses were not opposed to an engagement with India.

In February 1999, in his second term as prime minister, he attempted to repair Indo-Pak ties with a ‘Lahore Declaration’ with his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee – after high tension between the two countries following a tit-for-tat testing of nuclear weapons.

Sharif excitedly recalled Vajpayee’s arrival in Pakistan on a bus. He reminisced how the late Indian matinee idol, Dev Anand, dashed out of the coach to hug him and tell him he had read at Lahore’s esteemed Government College and would like to visit it. Sharif replied, ‘I, too, studied at the Government College and will make sure you do so.’

Moved by the trip to his college, Anand asked Sharif if he could stay back in Lahore for a fortnight. The latter said he had no objection. But Indian officials decreed that since Anand had come with Vajpayee’s official delegation, he would have to return with it.

Sharif, then, in a reverie reeled of lyrics of songs in Anand’s 1960s blockbuster Guide and other Bollywood movies. He added he’s hooked on listening to music for at least an hour or two before he retires at night. He didn’t elaborate on his preference. I surmised, though, it was Indian cinema hits of older vintage. India’s fortunate soft-power stranglehold over its neighbour.

The Pakistani chief of army staff (COAS), the late General Pervez Musharraf, disapproved of the Lahore Declaration; and spectacularly sabotaged it three months later with a Pakistani incursion into the Indian-controlled Kargil region of Kashmir. Indeed, he went a step further by ousting Sharif in a coup d-etat in October of the same year.

Imprisoned and charged with treason, it was apprehended he would be executed like a previous Pakistani prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was in 1979, when intervention by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s financial benefactor for decades, providentially exiled him to that country.

In 2017, Sharif was charged with corruption and a year later disqualified him from holding public office by the Pakistani supreme court. He relocated to London; from where he returned to Pakistan in 2023, before being acquitted by the Islamabad high court in two graft cases.

Ironically, it was his khaki bete noire who ushered Sharif into politics. His father Muhammad Sharif was one of the founders of Ittefaq Foundries, which had become Pakistan’s largest iron and steel producer, making a variety of products, including hardware for the Pakistan Army, when in 1972 Bhutto nationalised the industry. In 1978, though, General Zia-ul-Haq unseated Bhutto in a putsch and returned the business to the Sharifs. Five years later, he appointed Nawaz as Punjab’s finance minister. When elections were held in 1988, Sharif emerged as the province’s chief minister.

Two on, he ascended to the post of Pakistan’s prime minister, only to be unseated a little over two and a half years later. His attempt to clip the armed forces’ wings was rudely resisted. There now ensued in the 1990s a game of thrones between him and his Pakistan People’s Party rival Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfiqar and the first woman head of government in a Muslim state (who died in a suicide attack in 2007).

As the conversation continued, Sharif regretted the suspension of direct trade between the two nations. His pet inclination has always been developing economic relations with India. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said, ‘to export and import via third countries.’ Trade between the two countries has predictably plummeted to a negligible turnover.

Direct trade between the two countries stalled after India accused Pakistan of being behind the killing of Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Pulwama in Kashmir in February 2019.

In 2014, during Sharif’s third term as premier, his government was about to sign a non-discriminatory market access (NDMA) treaty with India, before rather peremptorily withdrawing from it. The Pakistani government was persuaded by a Maryland-based Hindutva activist that grant of NDMA status to India just before the then imminent general election would be advantageous to the incumbent Congress party. But contrary Pakistan’s expectation, BJP did not proceed with the deal.

If Sharif thinks he was short-changed, he did not express this. Professor Athar Hussain of the London School of Economics had projected Indo-Pak trade of $50 billion in a decade. This is not impossible, given the way Sino-indian trade has burgeoned.

His citing of the absence of direct transport and trade indicated these be restored, while not ignoring the issues of Kashmir and terrorism. For Kashmir, there’s a readymade template in the progress made by Ambassador Satinder Lambah and his interlocutor civil servant Tariq Aziz in 2004-2008 – on the basis of which talks can resume. As for terrorism, with both sides affected, a joint mechanism could be a solution. But this would need mutual goodwill and trust, bother of which have long evaporated.

The Sharif family’s Ittefaq Group – buffeted over the years by the Pakistan Army and Nawaz’s political opponents – has ceased to exist. Nawaz’s himself now derives pleasure from farming and governing a charitable state-of-the-art hospital near where he lives, attached to which are medical, nursing and dental colleges. Profits from the schools finance the free medical care.

Legend has it that Lahore takes its name after Loh, son of Rama. This month, Sharif was appointed patron-in-chief of the Lahore Heritage Revival Authority, entrusted with preserving the metropolis’ monuments from pre-Mughal to British times, not to mention remnants of the Mughal and Sikh empires in between.

Earlier this week, Sharif observed the nicety of attending the current Pakistani COAS, General Asim Munir’s mother’s funeral. But there is no love lost between him and the institution of the Pakistan Army. At a previous tete-a-tete with me in London, he blamed it for much of Pakistan’s ills, including the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. About being evicted from office a third time, he said, but for it, ‘Pakistan would have progressed leaps and bounds.’

Pakistan’s economy has subsequently been in a tailspin, which the Imran Khan premiership in the interim failing to arrest it. But there are green-shoots of a revival in the US$350 billion economy. The International Monetary Fund, which had provided a US$7 billion bailout, stated this week, ‘Over the past 18 months, Pakistan has made significant progress in restoring macroeconomic stability and rebuilding confidence despite a challenging global environment.’

Inflation, which hit 40 percent in May 2023, had declined to 1.5 percent last month. The Karachi Stock Exchange has been on a northward trend since the beginning of 2025. Economic growth, though, remains moderate. As president of the ruling party, Sharif should be reasonably satisfied.

He evinced interest in IPAC’s efforts to encourage a rapprochement between India and Pakistan. He asked to be apprised of the proceedings at its upcoming session - in order to study proposals therein. His interest in India seemed intact, notwithstanding suffering because of it.

His decision to attend the BJP government’s swearing in ceremony in 2014 didn’t go down well with the army either, nor did Narendra Modi’s surprise presence at Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding in 2015. A week later, coincidentally, erupted an attack on an Indian military base in Pathankot. The Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed group was suspected of being behind it.

Sharif is unlikely to unilaterally rock the boat, so as not to inconvenience his brother. At the same time, no initiative with or response to India is likely to be implemented without consulting the elder Sharif.