Nawaz Sharif

Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif was born on December 25, 1949 in Lahore, the largest city of Pakistani Punjab, a little over two years after the creation of Pakistan ^[1]. His father, Muhammad Sharif, was an industrialist whose family had migrated from Jati Umra in Amritsar district at partition and who built the Ittefaq Group, a steel and engineering business that became one of the better known industrial houses in Punjab ^[2].

Sharif studied at Saint Anthony's High School in Lahore and took a degree from Government College Lahore before reading law at the University of Punjab ^[1]. As a young man he played club cricket and retained a lifelong enthusiasm for the game; decades later, as prime minister, he was a visible patron of Pakistani cricket. His early adulthood, however, was dominated by the family firm. The nationalization of major industries under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s hit the Ittefaq foundries hard, an experience that shaped the family's hostility to the Pakistan Peoples Party and pushed the young businessman toward politics ^[2].

Sharif entered public life under the military government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, which returned the family's nationalized assets and cultivated business families in Punjab as a counterweight to the Bhutto loyalists. He served as finance minister of Punjab province from 1981 and became chief minister of Punjab in 1985, after the partyless elections held under Zia ^[1]. Punjab holds more than half of Pakistan's population, and running it gave Sharif a political base no rival in the province could match.

After Zia's death in a 1988 air crash, Sharif emerged as the leading figure of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, a conservative alliance assembled to oppose Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party. He kept the Punjab chief ministership while Bhutto governed federally, and the two waged an attritional contest between Lahore and Islamabad ^[3]. When Bhutto's government was dismissed in 1990, the alliance won the general election and Sharif became prime minister of Pakistan for the first time on November 6, 1990 ^[1].

His first government pursued privatization and deregulation, reversing parts of the state-led economic model of the 1970s, and launched infrastructure projects including the Lahore to Islamabad motorway, which opened later in the decade ^[4]. The term ended early: President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dissolved the assembly in 1993, the Supreme Court restored it, and the deadlock was finally broken when both president and prime minister resigned under an arrangement brokered by the army chief ^[3].

Sharif returned to power in February 1997 with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in Pakistani history, leading the Pakistan Muslim League (N) ^[1]. The scale of the mandate let him amend the constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment stripped the president of the power to dismiss elected governments, a power that had ended four governments since 1988 ^[3].

The defining moment of the term came in May 1998. After India tested nuclear devices at Pokhran, Sharif ordered Pakistan's own tests in the Chagai hills of Balochistan on May 28, 1998, making Pakistan the first declared nuclear power in the Muslim world ^[5]. The tests brought international sanctions but broad domestic approval, and they remain among the most cited Nawaz Sharif achievements. In February 1999 he hosted Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lahore, where the two signed the Lahore Declaration committing both countries to peaceful resolution of disputes ^[5].

That opening collapsed within months when Pakistani forces and irregulars occupied heights on the Indian side of the Line of Control near Kargil, triggering a limited war in the summer of 1999. Sharif's relations with the army command, already strained, broke down completely. On October 12, 1999, after Sharif attempted to remove army chief General Pervez Musharraf, the military seized power in a bloodless coup and placed the prime minister under arrest ^[1]. Convicted in 2000 on hijacking and terrorism charges arising from the coup night, when Musharraf's aircraft was denied landing in Karachi, Sharif was sentenced to life imprisonment. A Saudi-brokered arrangement later that year sent him and his family into exile in Jeddah ^[3].

Sharif spent most of the 2000s abroad, first in Saudi Arabia and later in London. In 2006 he and Benazir Bhutto, long the fiercest of rivals, signed the Charter of Democracy in London, a joint pledge to restore civilian supremacy and refrain from inviting military intervention against each other ^[3].

He returned to Pakistan in November 2007 as Musharraf's rule unraveled. In the February 2008 elections, held weeks after Bhutto's assassination, his party finished second and briefly joined a coalition with the Pakistan Peoples Party before moving into opposition ^[1]. Sharif built his standing during these years by championing the restoration of judges deposed by Musharraf, joining the lawyers' movement long march of 2009 that forced the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry ^[6].

The strategy paid off in May 2013, when the PML-N won a decisive victory and Sharif was sworn in as prime minister for a record third time on June 5, 2013. The handover from one elected civilian government to another was the first such transition in Pakistan's history ^[1].

The third government concentrated on the economy and energy. Chronic electricity shortages, which had produced blackouts of many hours a day, eased as new generation capacity came online, and in 2015 Pakistan and China formally launched the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a program of Chinese-financed roads, power plants, and port development valued in the tens of billions of dollars ^[4]. The government also faced a prolonged sit-in led by Imran Khan in 2014 alleging electoral fraud, and it ordered the Zarb-e-Azb military operation against militants in North Waziristan the same year.

In April 2016 the Panama Papers leak revealed offshore companies linked to Sharif's children that held expensive London apartments. Petitions reached the Supreme Court, which in July 2017 disqualified Sharif from office for failing to declare a salary receivable from a Dubai company owned by his son, ruling him not honest under Article 62 of the constitution ^[7]. He resigned the premiership on July 28, 2017; the court later declared the disqualification lifelong.

Accountability courts followed. In July 2018 Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz were convicted in the Avenfield apartments reference and imprisoned days before the general election, which the PML-N lost to Imran Khan's party. A second conviction, in the Al-Azizia steel mills case, came in December 2018 ^[7]. In November 2019, gravely ill, he was allowed to travel to London for medical treatment and remained there for four years.

From London, Sharif remained the ultimate authority in his party while his brother Shehbaz Sharif led it in Pakistan. In speeches to the opposition Pakistan Democratic Movement in 2020 he named serving generals and accused the military leadership of engineering his ouster, an unusually direct challenge from a mainstream politician ^[6]. After Imran Khan was removed through a no-confidence vote in April 2022, Shehbaz became prime minister, restoring the family to the center of power.

Sharif flew home on October 21, 2023 to a large reception in Lahore. Within weeks the courts overturned his Avenfield and Al-Azizia convictions on appeal, and in early 2024 the Supreme Court struck down lifetime disqualification, clearing his path back to electoral politics ^[7]. He led the PML-N campaign in the February 2024 election, won a National Assembly seat, and then stepped aside in favor of Shehbaz for the premiership. In May 2024 the party formally re-elected him as its president, a post he had been forced to vacate in 2018 ^[6].

His daughter Maryam Nawaz became chief minister of Punjab in 2024, the first woman to hold the office, extending the family's four-decade hold on the province where Sharif's own career began ^[6].

Sharif married Kulsoom Nawaz in 1971; the couple had four children, including Maryam Nawaz, and Kulsoom served three times as first lady before her death in London in September 2018, while her husband and daughter were imprisoned in Pakistan ^[2]. The wider Sharif family remains one of South Asia's most consequential political dynasties, with wealth rooted in the Ittefaq industrial group and a base at the Raiwind estate outside Lahore.

For readers asking who was Nawaz Sharif, or rather who he is, since he remains alive and politically active, the answer resists a single verdict. Supporters credit him with motorways, power plants, nuclear deterrence, and repeated electoral mandates; critics point to the corruption convictions, dynastic politics, and his own early rise under military patronage ^[3]. Among the more striking Nawaz Sharif facts is that no prime minister of Pakistan, himself included, has ever completed a full five-year term, and his three truncated premierships illustrate why: the contest between elected leaders, courts, and the army has defined the state itself ^[1].

Whatever the final judgment, his career maps the arc of Pakistani politics from Zia's martial law to the present. Few living figures have shaped, and been shaped by, that turbulent history so completely ^[3].