India - The Country

It is a miracle that India even exists. Being a powerhouse nation of just under a billion people with so many ethnicities and religions, it should have ripped itself into a bunch of dinky fiefdoms long ago, each with hundreds of years of history, separate religions, dialects and customs. Like a terminally ill patient, India deals with the ugliest boils and rashes first. Its big problems are in the extreme south with the Tamil Tigers, and in the north with Sikh, Muslim and tribal separatists. Every time a bomb goes off (and they go off a lot), the suspects include Indians, Pakistani agents, Kashmiri separatists, Sikh terrorists, Maoist tribal rebels, Tamil Eelam guerrillas, Muslim militants, drug traffickers and even gangsters. Mother Teresa was the only one exempt from suspicion. And she's dead.

India bristles at its colonial-made borders, complete with equally belligerent neighbors like China, Pakistan and Myanmar. Although the core of India has the gray industrious bustling of a Third World country, its borders are very much warring outposts complete with bunkers, artillery duels, terrorists raids and MiG-21s.

One of the ugliest scenarios on the horizon could be India's nuke race with Pakistan. While the world ignores the global consequences of what is perceived as a Hatfield-and-McCoy stick fight in the boonies, the CIA quietly announced recently that Pakistan and India are two of the planet's top choices for potential serious instability. It is a war kept out of the headlines as the two sides face off in high altitude bunkers and have firefights on glaciers.

India has the capability of lobbing a nuclear warhead within 1,000 feet of a target 150 miles away, striking most major Pakistani cities within five minutes after launch. In this part of the world, that's close enough. In January 1996, a mosque in the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir was turned into mush by a conventional rocket; it killed 20 worshipers. Each side blamed the other, and an artillery and small arms squash match ensued.

India and Pakistan, in their relatively embryonic relationship, have already fought three wars. Pakistan has gone home crying each time. In between official wars both countries recruit, train and field separatist extremists-Pakistan funds the nasties in the Indian-controlled region of Kashmir, while India fans the flames of hatred in Pakistan's Sind area.

In the tortured northeast, tribal groups based deep in jungle hideouts fight for freedom and to keep settlers from drowning them out. Bombings, kidnappings, riots and assassinations are the general tone.

Not one to miss out on a gang banging, China is also part of India's multifront diplomatic fray. Just to keep China honest, India fought a brief border war with the Sinos back in 1962. Since then, though, the two countries' relations have improved-if for no other reason than their mutual respect for the size of each others' populations, and the realization that a conventional ground war might take a few hundred years to fight, and still leave each country with populations the size of the United States.