Yet, at a public meeting in Karachi last week, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, while warning India, said: ``We are not beggarsnow. By the grace of God, we can defend ourselves.'' At the same time, Pakistani newspapers report that talks are on between a five-member IMF team and Finance Minister Ishaq Dar for the release of $100 million by July this year, out of the $1.6 billion Extended Structural Adjustment Facility and Extended Fund Facility (which The Economist has advised the IMF to think long and hard about). The team is also demanding that Pakistan impose a sales tax on gas and power supply in the 1999-2000 federal budget. It's a demand Pakistan cannot ignore, with its external debt being over 50 per cent of its GDP (compared to India's 27.3 per cent).

Pakistan is a country in trouble. As is clear from its rupee now being devalued by 10.8 per cent to Rs 53.40 a dollar, despite the Government's decision to enforce a unified exchange rate. It doesn't help that the Karachi Stock Exchange has dropped by 15 per cent since the tension started. It is in such trouble that even The Economist in its May 22 issue has said:``Whereas previous governments were chaotic in their awfulness, this one has turned out to be systematic.''

Economically, certainly, but also socially and politically. This is a country where a former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has to go on the BBC in London to allege an attempted murder of her husband in police interrogation, and still not win much sympathy, having been convicted of graft, sentenced to five years imprisonment, and banned from political activity.

This is a country where a leading journalist can be picked up from his home by the ISI under the Pakistan Army Act, 1952, at night, and then be lodged in jail with no explanation for almost a month, for speaking the truth in an ``enemy'' country. This is a country that is groaning under lack of civil rights but where its Minister for Kashmir Affairs Abdul Majid Malik can lash out at human rights groups for being silent about ``India's targeting of civilians''. Whether it is NGOs from all four provinces in the country rejecting the``non-transparent, non-participatory and discriminatory process'' being followed by the government to draft an NGO Bill to restrict and control them or state agencies trying to hush up negligence in giving prior warning about a cyclone that has devastated their coastal belt, Pakistan is a disaster waiting to strike.

The political situation is in a state of disarray. On Tuesday, the opposition members literally captured National Assembly seats they said were theirs, blaming the Government for not allotting them new seats for over nine months. A High Court judgment in London has ordered Sharif's father and two brothers to repay $32.5 million in loans taken from a Saudi finance house for a paper mill. That is probably the only thing that troubles Sharif: he has already weakened the presidency with a constitutional amendment, removed a chief justice and an army chief, and had a clean chit from none less than Defence Minister George Fernandes.