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Watch | Nawaz Sharif admits Pakistan ‘violated’ 1999 agreement with India inked by him and Vajpayee

Watch | Nawaz Sharif admits Pakistan ‘violated’ 1999 agreement with India inked by him and Vajpayee

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

Former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif stated on Tuesday that Islamabad had "violated" a 1999 agreement with India inked by him and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in an apparent allusion to Gen Pervez Musharraf's Kargil misadventure.

"On May 28, 1998, Pakistan carried out five nuclear tests. After that Vajpayee Saheb came here and made an agreement with us. But we violated that agreement...it was our fault,"Sharif stated at aPML-N general councilgathering where he was chosen president of the governing party six years after he was disqualified by the Supreme Court.

On February 21, 1999, Nawaz Sharif and Atal Bihari Vajpayee signed the Lahore Declaration following a summit in India. The agreement represented a significant achievement as it discussed a vision of stability and peace between the two nations. However, the Kargil conflict began a few months later as a result of Pakistani incursion into the Kargil area of Jammu and Kashmir.

"President Bill Clinton had offered Pakistan USD 5 billion to stop it from carrying out nuclear tests but I refused. Had a person like(former prime minister) Imran Khan been on my seat he would have accepted Clinton's offer," Sharif said on a day when Pakistan marked the 26th anniversary of its first nuclear tests.

The 74-year-old Sharif discussed how Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar ousted him from the office of the prime minister in 2017. He added that while the allegations against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf founding leader Imran Khan were genuine, all the accusations against him were false.

He also discussed how Gen. Zahirul Islam, the former head of the ISI, helped topple his administration in 2017 to bringImran Khan into power.

He claimed that Khan will sit at the feet of the military establishment. "I ask Imran not to blame us (of being patronised by the army) and tell whether Gen Islam had talked about bringing the PTI into power," he said.

The three-time prime minister revealed how, in 2014, he received a message from Gen. Islam requesting his resignation. "When I refused, he threatened to make an example of me," he stated.

(With inputs from agencies)