Nawaz Sharif

Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif was born in Lahore on 25 December 1949, the son of the businessman Muhammad Sharif, founder of the Ittefaq and Sharif business groups. He leads the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and sits for a Lahore seat in the National Assembly, in the western half of the Punjab divided in 1947. He was Chief Minister of Punjab from 1985 and Prime Minister of Pakistan three times: 6 November 1990 to 18 July 1993, 17 February 1997 to 12 October 1999, and 5 June 2013 to 28 July 2017.

His place in this record rests on his office, not on any Sikh policy of his own. On 21 February 1999 he and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee signed the Lahore Declaration. Vajpayee had crossed at Wagah on the first Delhi to Lahore bus and was received there by Sharif. ThePrint's Kartarpur timeline and Arab News both say the Kartarpur corridor was first proposed on that bus visit. Neither names Sharif as the author of the proposal, and the sources opened do not show what Sharif himself said or did about it. Pakistan's cabinet approved the corridor on 23 November 2018, under Prime Minister Imran Khan, who laid its foundation stone that month. It opened in November 2019.

The Kargil conflict of May 1999 stalled the Lahore process, and a military coup led by Pervez Musharraf removed his government in October 1999. Pakistani officials have tied his name to Sikh pilgrimage only in passing. In November 2015 the chairman of the Evacuee Trust Property Board welcomed about 2,500 Indian Sikh pilgrims at Wagah for Guru Nanak's 547th birth anniversary and said Sharif wanted good relations with India (Dawn). That is an official's statement, not a policy document.

Key moments

• 1985: becomes Chief Minister of Punjab (Pakistan).
• 1990 to 1993, 1997 to 1999, 2013 to 2017: Prime Minister of Pakistan.
• 21 February 1999: signs the Lahore Declaration with Vajpayee.
• October 1999: removed in a military coup.
• 2017: disqualified by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in the Panama Papers case.
• 24 December 2018: sentenced to seven years in the Al-Azizia case. He spent nearly four years in London and returned in October 2023. The Islamabad High Court acquitted him in that case on 12 December 2023.
• 29 February 2024: sits in the National Assembly again; president of the PML(N) from 28 May 2024.

Why he appears here. He is the Lahore politician who received Vajpayee in 1999. The first date in ThePrint's Kartarpur timeline is that visit, and the corridor itself was settled under a later government. The court cases above are reported as the sources give them; this page does not judge his politics.