In retrospect, India got away remarkably lightly. This is the result of no accident but of admirable tenacity, a determination to learn from mistakes and on no count to compromise on fundamental aims and interests. Time is of the essence for perspective but already it is safe to say that the management of the nuclear blasts' fallout has been a phenomenal success. A passage from a column in Newsweek by Gerald Segal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, is worth quoting: ``India's test last May, and the subsequent Pakistani tests, were supposed to have put the region on a hair trigger for nuclear war and wreckedthe struggle against non-proliferation. Nonsense. If anything, South Asia...is a more stable place than it has been for many years. The real loser is the West -- particularly the United States -- whose noisy diplomatic effort to treat Indians and Pakistanis as pariahs and primitives has failed.''

The BJP blundered in not following up the blasts with a liberalising and outward-looking Budget that would have set the cat among the world's moralising pigeons. That was remedied this year. For the rest, the report card is unmixedly happy. The bus diplomacy never would have happened without Pokharan. The rest of the West never was quite so sanctimonious, but Washington now displays a sensitivity to India's strategic concerns that frankly sends out a perverse message to other nuclear wannabes. The world's failure to show more than token indignation for the Agni test shows that nothing succeeds like success. Nuclear peacenik Japan failed even to summon India's ambassador for a protest. The initial blundering withChina has been somewhat reversed. The economy has suffered, but far less than might have been expected. Above all, the fear that the government would lose its nerve after the bravado of May 11 and 13 and panic into compromising its own security concerns has been patently belied. Let the successor government take note.