Former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke to each other on the phone at least five times during the course of the 1999 Kargil war, with the latter veering to the view that Mr Sharif had been bamboozled by then army chief General Pervez Musharraf into the conflict, The Hindu said on Sunday, quoting from a new book by Mr Vajpayee’s private secretary.

The book on Mr Vajpayee’s tumultuous tenure, Vajpayee: The Years That Changed India by former bureaucrat Shakti Sinha, who served as Vajpayee’s private secretary for many years, goes on to say that the communication was kept up after a telling incident between Mr Sharif and R.K. Mishra, a former head of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the man selected for back-channel talks to end the conflict.

“…Sharif’s position was a tenuous one, and in a later meeting, he indicated to Mishra that they should take a walk in the garden, obviously suspecting that his own house was tapped. When Mishra reported this to Vajpayee, the latter took this as an indication that Sharif was more a prisoner of circumstances than anything else,” says the book.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1596957/nawaz-vajpayee-spoke-over-phone-in-midst-of-kargil-war-says-book