No country should have more to fear from Pakistan's slide toward instability than India.

In the six decades since an independent India and Pakistan rose from the flames of the bloody partition of the subcontinent, the South Asian rivals have stared at each other across heavily armed frontiers with implacable hostility, fought three wars and engaged in tit-for- tat atomic tests.

Saber-rattling brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war in 2001 after an attack on the Indian parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-backed militants.

Yet as Pakistan has stumbled in recent months from a military dictatorship to a state of emergency, to uncertainty in the wake of the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, India's’reactions have been tempered even calm.

India put its troops on a higher state of alert after the emergency was declared and again after the Benazir killing, officially blamed on

Islamic militant groups. But it refrained from mass mobilization.

India's stock market dipped slightly the morning after the killing with investors concerned about instability in the region. By the afternoon, it had resumed its climb. News reports focused equally on the Indian cricket team's poor performance against Australia.

It's not that India is no longer worried about Pakistan it is, deeply. But a decade of sustained economic growth pegged at about 9 percent this year has transformed India into a global economic player, giving it self-assurance and the cash to spend heavily on its military.

"The general confidence level in India today is much higher," said C. Uday Bhaskar, a prominent New Delhi-based defence analyst.

India has been content to let the United States spearhead efforts to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal a development made possible by New Delhi's increasingly close ties with Washington after decades of Cold War hostility.