Weeks before the Kargil war erupted between India and Pakistan in 1999, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif governments discussed through back-channel talks a communal division of Jammu & Kashmir along the Chenab river — the “Chenab Formula” — as one of the solutions to the Kashmir issue, a new book has revealed.
According to Abhishek Choudhary’s biography “Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power”, a series of secret back-channel talks were held between retired Pakistani diplomat and former high commissioner to India Niaz Naik and Indian interlocutor R K Mishra at a Delhi hotel following Vajpayee’s historic 1999 visit to Pakistan and the Lahore Declaration.
“In the last week of March 1999, Sharif’s emissary Niaz Naik… secretly checked into a Delhi hotel to pick up the threads with R. K. Mishra. Over the next five days, they discussed their impossible brief on Kashmir: a solution that was not just fair to all three concerned parties (one of them being the Kashmiris) but also practical to implement,” reads the book, which is the sequel to Choudhary’s award-winning bestseller “Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right”.
With Vajpayee encouraging the duo “to innovate”, Mishra and Naik, after several rounds of trial and error, arrived at an “identifiable geographical boundary” as a border to partition J&K between the two countries — the “Chenab Formula”.
“(The formula) suggested by Naik, proposed giving areas to the west of the river, all Muslim-majority districts, to Pakistan; the ones to the east, all Hindu-majority, were to be retained by India,” it adds.
The discarded options included: “the LoC as the international border (rejected by Naik), autonomy for Kashmir (rejected by Naik), independence for Kashmir (rejected by Mishra), and a region-wise plebiscite (rejected by Mishra)”.
According to the book, before returning to Islamabad on April 1, Naik met Vajpayee, who sent a discreet message for Nawaz Sharif: “halt infiltration and cross-border shelling during the summer months”.
But that was not to be the case, and even as the secret diplomacy progressed, trouble was brewing. By early May, Indian intelligence and patrol units reported increased aggression along the Line of Control.
Later, alarmed by the situation, Vajpayee dispatched Mishra to Islamabad with a pointed message.
“On 17 May, an agitated R. K. Mishra alighted in Islamabad carrying Vajpayee’s deep hurt. He asked Sharif, point-blank, whether he had known about Kargil while signing the ‘Lahore Declaration’,” the book claims.
The ‘Lahore Declaration’, signed on February 21, 1999, by Vajpayee and Sharif, was a peace agreement between India and Pakistan aimed at improving relations and reducing the risk of nuclear conflict.
Ironically, it was May 17 — the very day when Vajpayee’s emissary questioned Sharif on Kargil — when the Pakistani premier received his “first briefing” on the Kargil operation.
“It was a selective briefing by the Kargil clique, presented without detailed maps, aimed to cajole Sharif into providing the government’s cover for the army’s private crusade,” the book adds.
While Pakistan’s foreign minister Sartaj Aziz and other officials were reportedly stunned, Sharif, who was swayed by “flattery” and “selective intelligence”, dismissed their concerns, remarking, “Sartaj Aziz sahib, can we ever take Kashmir through paperwork?” “With a tactical advantage from the strategic heights in Kargil, he (Sharif) advised the army to ‘take Allah’s name and keep this Operation going, this issue cannot be resolved through buses’,” it claims.
The Kargil War, also known as ‘Operation Vijay’, began in May 1999 and concluded in July with the Indian Army successfully pushing back Pakistani infiltrators from key positions.
On July 26, India declared victory after nearly three months of intense fighting in the icy heights of Ladakh’s Kargil region.
“Believer’s Dilemma”, priced at Rs 999, is described by publishing house PanMacmillan India as a political history of contemporary India covering the crucial period between 1978–2018 — “a transformative 40-year span that saw the Hindu Right move from the fringes into the corridors of power”. (PTI)
