By ballot and bullet, the Indian and Pakistani states have committed themselves to the forces of the Right by late 1999. In India, an election returns a vast alliance dominated by the Hindu Right, while in Pakistan, the generals resort to a coup d'etat against a corrupt, but democratically elected regime.
Some may find in these instances the natural condition of Third World States, fraught with the trials of poverty and corruption, and assume such is the fate of the poor nations of the world. Nothing can be further from the truth. Despite the frequency of instability in South Asia, both India and Pakistan have produced regimes capable of resilience and stability, although not always on the side of social justice. Between justice and the status quo, regimes in South Asia have tried to govern with some measure of balance, even if they have generally favoured the latter to the former. Nevertheless, land reforms and industrial growth, laws on behalf of oppressed peoples and extensions of the franchise, among other things, reveal to us that there is no 'natural' condition of instability in South Asia.
Current events in the region must be seen not in terms of the 'natural' failure of Third World states, but in the light of the watershed of May 1998. The nuclear tests threw diplomatic and moral caution to the winds. After the 11 May 1998 tests, Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani warned Islamabad to "roll back its anti-India policy, especially with regard to Kashmir". Less than three weeks later, Pakistan conducted its own tests and its army chief, and now also the country's Chief Executive, General Pervez Musharraf, noted that "Pakistan is talking to India on an equal basis. We are not talking to India from a weak position".
When Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee met at the SAARC summit in Sri Lanka in late July 1998, Pakistan came to demand that the two countries discuss nothing else but Kashmir. 'Bus Diplomacy' and the Lahore Declaration yielded little in terms of confidence building measures for the two sides. Given the decision to test nuclear devices, editor of the Indian fortnightly Frontline, N. Ram argues in his new book, Riding the Nuclear Tiger, that "the leading share of responsibility for the failure of the Lahore exercise to achieve real progress towards resolving the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff rests with the BJP-led government".