NEW DELHI–Coincidence or not, as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's influence waned this year, there was a spike in firing across the Indian border, a bomb attack on India's Kabul embassy and diplomatic spats over Kashmir.
Now he has been forced to resign, India fears relations between the two nuclear rivals could get even worse.
While many Pakistanis despised Musharraf as a dictator, India enjoyed some of its best diplomatic relations in decades during his rule.
New Delhi's fear is that a weak civilian government in Islamabad will be unable to exert the same muscle Musharraf did over Pakistan's army and the powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, which India suspects has a hand in most attacks on its soil.
"How the vacuum is handled by the civilian government, how much control they can exercise on the radical elements remains to be seen," said a senior Indian foreign ministry official.
Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said "India will continue to have an amicable relation with Pakistan in the days to come."
The two countries have fought three wars since independence in 1947 and nearly came to a fourth one in 2002.
But since a peace process began in 2004 under Musharraf, there has been a string of improvements, from a cross-border bus service to more trade and some progress over border disputes.
That peace process could now be dumped, with a return to the hostilities that dogged South Asia for decades. Some Indian experts fear more Pakistan-backed militant attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India if Islamabad's new civilian government fails to assert control over the military.
"Musharraf was seen by India as decisive and ready to engage, compared with the chaos and division of the last few months."
In Kabul, the U.S.-backed Afghan government welcomed Musharraf's resignation, saying he "was not someone good for Afghanistan" and that his departure will have a positive effect on the region.
Afghanistan has accused the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of being behind an April assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai and the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed more than 60 people.
Karzai's spokesperson, Humayun Hamidzada, reiterated a Afghan government demand that Pakistan's military intelligence service cease its activities in Afghanistan.
Afghan interior ministry spokesperson Zemeri Bashary said Musharraf was an ally of the United States in words only. He said Afghanistan wants a Pakistani president who pursues peace by his actions, and not only through words.
Musharraf "was not someone good for Afghanistan," said Bashary. "We hope that someone good will replace him."
