AFTER the celebrations in New Delhi are over, will the Bharatiya Janata Party be sending a high-powered delegation to Pakistan to thank Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for his enormous and perhaps indispensable help in ensuring the BJP's victory? If Vajpayee and Advani have any sense of obligation (and grace) they will do so for who would know better than them that the opportunities provided by the Pakistan prime minister have been crucial to their success.

When Vajpayee's minority government fell in April and fresh elections were announced, the BJP and Congress looked equally bedraggled and discredited. The BJP's leadership had been lacklustre and consequently its stock among the public not very high. As for the Congress, it had needlessly brought down a government without being able to form a new one. The Indian electorate was fed up. It wanted an end to the political instability racking the country. But to add to its frustrations, there was nothing very inspiring about either of the two major parties. All the indications therefore suggested that the elections would yield another hung Lok Sabha with no party or alliance getting an outright majority.

But just as the election campaign was getting underway there happened the miracle of Kargil. Forget Pakistan, it was the Indian election scene which was transformed. With no little help from the media, the Indian caretaker government led by Vajpayee whipped up a war hysteria. This had a unifying effect on the country and the beneficiary of this mood, much to the chagrin of the Congress, was the BJP.

But more to the point, the Kargil flare-up gave Vajpayee the opportunity to present himself as a responsible and mature statesman, handling a war situation coolly and resolutely. This was the difference between performing indifferently at the polls and winning a majority. Lest anyone forget, this difference, so vital to the outcome of the Indian elections, was provided by none other than Pakistan's great helmsman, Nawaz Sharif.

Leaders invent war situations to win elections. Remember Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands war in this connection. Here an embattled Indian leadership, unsure of its election chances, was being handed a 'cosy' war situation on a platter. If nothing else, the BJP would have appreciated our sense of timing.

Why cosy? Simply because Kargil was a venture which Pakistan could never win and India never lose. What the Americans would have called a 'no-win' situation - no-win for us, that is, not for India. It was our fault to think that a tactical opportunity was a strategic opening when patently it was not. Discomfiture for us was therefore written in the circumstances of this conflict. But who benefited from it? At one level, Vajpayee and the BJP. At another, India.

While Vajpayee has his election victory, India has the diplomatic advantage over Pakistan in chanceries around the world. Contrast the newly-discovered rapport between Madeleine Albright and Jaswant Singh and the rough time Sartaj Aziz has had in some of his recent diplomatic encounters. This should provide a measure of Pakistan's current international standing.

Sartaj Aziz, when the definitive history of the foreign office comes to be written, will probably figure as the great masochist of Pakistani foreign policy: wearing a permanent smile on his face even when snubbed all the time. But it is scarcely his fault. No foreign minister could have had a worse brief to handle. Indeed, supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan did not earn us half the opprobrium that this summer's folly has done. Being painted as a rogue state, perennially indebted and not to be trusted with its nuclear weapons. This is the image we have managed to create for ourselves. All for the greater good of the BJP and India. And all at a time when the great helmsman was guiding the nation's destinies.

But the people of Pakistan need not worry. None of the above has cramped the style of their rulers. Made of sterner stuff, they continue to function as if nothing had happened. Banks loans remain unpaid. The country's affairs may be in a mess but their industrial ventures continue to prosper. In the latest scam to hit the banking sector, the tell-tale signs of fraudulent dealings in Bankers' Equity Limited, the names have figured of the two families in Punjab whose political and economic fortunes have prospered in a dizzying fashion since General Zia-ul-Haq's time.

Remember the great cooperatives scandal of 1991 in which tens of thousands of shareholders lost all their savings? The names of the same two families, may their fortunes grow, figured in that as well. When there was a public outcry a one-man commission, headed by Justice Lone of the Supreme Court, was set up to investigate the matter and fix responsibility. Justice Lone in effect held that the integrity and rectitude of the two families in question were so much beyond dispute that they could not possibly be guilty of financial impropriety. Justice Lone, since retired from the Supreme Court, now adorns the Senate as a member of the ruling party.

This is one vital difference between India and Pakistan. Over there corruption at the very top - for instance, Rajiv Gandhi's implication in the Bofors scandal, Narasimha Rao's implication in the Hawala scandal - is the exception not the norm. Also, when such a thing does happen, there is an outcry and questions are asked. Here none at all. Open financial robbery has become the norm with no questions asked. Accountability is only for the defeated, such as Benazir Bhutto and Zardari, not the victors. Nor is there any shamefacedness in all this, the scale of the robbing being matched by the impudence with which it is carried out.

Imagine a defaulter of over a billion rupees approaching the courts and requesting that his name be removed from the list of defaulters so that he can contract more loans for the running of his business concerns. Imagine two defaulters, both in power, approaching the courts and asking for compensation from the banks they owe money to on the grounds that their defaults were 'engineered'. The amount of money asked for in compensation is about the same as the size of their defaults. This is audacity dressed in style.

If all this can be sustained, then it is not too bad. The people of Pakistan are used to the notion of repression and plunder. But the point may have come where the question is not whether the people can put up with highway robbery but whether the state can sustain any more of it.

We have the example of Russia before us which has been ruined not by godless communism but by the rapacity of the ruling elite. Russian assets have been sold bit by bit and the money spirited abroad. Things indeed have come to such a pass where even IMF money meant for shoring up the country's finances has been embezzled. It is some mercy that Pakistan's embezzlers have not reached that stage. But short of that they have left nothing to chance.