Cast from the Past: How India's 'most loved' prime minister stunned Pakistan in Kargil

In February 1999, India's then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee noticed too big a diplomatic slight to be left unnoticed at a helipad near Governor's House in Pakistan's Lahore. Pakistani army chief General Pervez Musharraf, while receiving the visiting Indian prime minister, was wearing his official military uniform and not a ceremonial one as he was supposed to according to the established protocol.

On the Indian side, this was interpreted as the Pakistani deep state's boorish show of disagreement against Vajpayee's unprecedented peace overtures; the Pakistani army's implicit act of resistance to peace with India that it concluded by occupying Indian military posts in Jammu and Kashmir.

A month later in March 1999, Vajpayee called Niaz Naik — Islamabad's emissary for peace talks with New Delhi that were finalised as part of Vajpayee's Lahore visit — and told him to send a message to the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The message was clear. Come summer and Pakistani armed forces would stop giving cover fire to the terrorists crossing over the Line of Control into India's Jammu and Kashmir. But to everyone's surprise in New Delhi, the summer was going to be different from previous summers of decades of prolonged India-Pakistan conflict.

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The above two incidents are mentioned in two of Vajpayee's biographies, 'Vajpayee: the years that changed India', authored by his former personal secretary Shakti Sinha, and 'Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A man of all seasons' authored by Kingshuk Nag.

On 3 May 1999, two weeks after the resignation of the second Vajpayee government, a Buddhist shepherd in Kargil —barely a few kilometres from the Line of Control or LoC, the de facto boundary between India and Pakistan — chanced upon a number of Pakistani soldiers in camouflage.

Soldiers who went to investigate were ambushed, and an ammunition dump was blown up.

Vajpayee, now a ‘caretaker’ prime minister after losing a parliamentary no-trust vote, was informally briefed. He immediately called a cabinet meeting to discuss ‘some urgent matter’.

Around 1,500 to 2,400 Pakistani military men and irregular fighters had entrenched themselves along a 150-odd kilometre stretch on the Indian side of the LoC at heights of 16,000feet. Pakistan kept on claiming that it was the so-called Mujahideen who were on the heights and not its army men. They were firing down below at the Srinagar–Leh highway, the lifeline for civilian and military supplies to northern Kashmir.

Vajpayee's strategic showpiece

While the Indian army was raining conventional fire to dislodge the Pakistanis, Vajpayee pulled off a remarkable strategic showpiece that catapulted previously pro-Pakistan US-led West to the Indian side. The caretaker prime minister explicitly ordered Indian Air Force planes to not cross the Line of Control, a signal to the international community that India, unlike Pakistan, respected the de-facto international boundary. "We knew we will fiercely defend ourselves not invade," Vajpayee said of his unconventional decision in New Delhi months later during his Independence Day address.

Meanwhile on 12 June1999, in the thick of the fighting in Kargil, the then Pakistani foreign minister Sartaj Aziz visited New Delhi.

Aziz, without agreeing to go back to the LoC status quo in Kargil, called for a ceasefire in a manner that occupied Indian posts would fall on the Pakistani side.

Aziz used the excuse that since the LoC was ‘unclear’, some inadvertent transgression might well have taken place.

"If the Pakistan Army was not involved in the intrusion and it was the Mujahideen, then why were they asking for a ceasefire?," Shakti Sinha writes of Sartaj Aziz-Jaswat Singh talks.

"And since when were the Mujahideen bound by the India–Pakistan agreement? Their stupidity was breathtaking and audacious."

After Sartaj Aziz's Delhi visit, when the Pakistan Army and the country’s political leadership both requested the US to intervene and help bring about a ceasefire, Vajpayee, in his telephonic conversations with the then US President Bill Clinton, made it clear that 'either Pakistanis could vacate Indian territory on their own, or India would throw them out the way it deemed best', Sinha writes further.

Clinton publicly rebuked Pakistan and called upon it to withdraw its troops back to the LoC at the earliest and respect the 'sanctity of the Line of Control.'

How Vajpayee delegated India's intense diplomacy during the war in Kargil?

Clinton's rebuke of Sharif was not a surprise in New Delhi's power corridors. India's intense diplomatic effort for weeks had built up to that moment.

Full-page advertisements rebuking Pakistan had made their way to the international press.

Vajpayee sent out extensive tours of the United States which were led by senior leaders Sushma Swaraj and Narendra Modi, the latter was to become India's Prime Minister fifteen years later while the former served in his cabinet as foreign minister.

As a result of the lobbying, what followed was the US imposing sanctions on Pakistan, which included blocking all assistance from international institutions like the IMF and World Bank. In fact, the House of Representatives subcommittee, led by Congressman Jim McDermott, had agreed on a far lower level of sanctions, but the thousands of fax messages that his office, and those of the other members, received —ensured an enhanced level of sanctions against Pakistan.

The war was technically over on 4 July1999, when Clinton dressed down Sharif.

But again, if the Pakistani leadership was withdrawing and conceding at the diplomatic level, the reality on the ground differed. There were fierce counter-attacks still taking place as the retreating Pakistani soldiers would withdraw from some posts but occupy others.

They left behind anti-personnel mines atlocations they were vacating.

Even the dead bodies of Pakistani soldiers were booby-trapped to inflict last-minute casualties on the Indian side. Thus the actual conflict with the retreating Pakistan Army ended only on 26 July, which India now celebrates as the Kargil Vijay Diwas.

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