India fears Musharraf exit to unleash tension

By Alistair Scrutton - Analysis

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Coincidence or not, as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's influence waned this year, there was a spike in firing across the Indian border, a bomb attack on India's Kabul embassy and diplomatic spats over Kashmir.

Now he has been forced to resign, India fears that relations between the two nuclear rivals could get even worse.

While many Pakistanis despised Musharraf as a dictator, India enjoyed some of its best diplomatic relations in decades during his rule.

New Delhi's fear is that a weak civilian government in Islamabad will be unable to exert the same muscle that Musharraf did over Pakistan's army and the powerful military spy agency, the ISI, which India suspects has a hand in most attacks on its soil.

"How the vacuum is handled by the civilian government, how much control they can exercise on the radical elements remains to be seen," a senior Indian foreign ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Reuters.

The Indian government reacted cautiously to word that Musharraf had quit. "We have no comments to make on the resignation of President Musharraf of Pakistan," it said in a statement. "This is an internal matter of Pakistan."

But Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee later told reporters that "India will continue to have an amicable relation with Pakistan in the days to come."

The two countries have fought three wars since independence in 1947 and nearly came to a fourth one in 2002.

But since a peace process began in 2004 under Musharraf, there has been a string of improvements, from a cross-border bus service to more trade and some progress over border disputes.

That peace process could now be dumped, with a return to the hostilities that dogged South Asia for decades. Some Indian experts fear more Pakistan-backed militant attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India if Islamabad's new civilian government fails to assert control over the military.

"After four good years in which India had high hopes for the peace process, in the last four months the opposite has happened," said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign affairs analyst based in Singapore.

"Musharraf was seen by India as decisive and ready to engage, compared with the chaos and division of the last few months."

RELATIONS UNDER STRESS

This month's mass protests in Kashmir, for example, sparked some of the sharpest diplomatic spats in years between Islamabad and New Delhi. India accused Pakistan of interfering in its internal affairs after Islamabad talked of U.N. intervention.

There has been a spate of clashes in the past few months along the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, after relative calm that followed the start of the peace process.