President Clinton's trip to South Asia is being viewed in terms of a stark contrast: He is visiting India to pay homage to a rising economic and nuclear power, and he will make a token stop in Pakistan to urge restraint and democracy on a military regime struggling to keep the nation from disintegrating.

But the situation in both countries is far more complex. Indeed, the nuclear arms race in the subcontinent and the sporadic fighting in Kashmir are symptoms of how state authority itself is under siege in both countries.

On an economist's chart, India is a success story, with millions of new wage earners and a middle class numbering up to 180 million, depending on one's definition of "middle class." But India may not be a rising power at all: its state authority is simply weakening at a slower pace, and in more nuanced ways, than Pakistan's. The paradox is that the fraying of the Indian government is driven not by social and economic failure, but by social and economic dynamism.

While in absolute terms India's middle class has grown, in relative terms it really hasn't. The overwhelming majority of India's billion-plus population is still backbreakingly poor. India is increasingly less an exotic canvas of rustic villages populated by subsistence farmers with little hope for a better lot in life than an industrial and post-industrial dynamo with tens of millions of migrants flooding into polluted, grimy factory encampments. When these workers take on low-wage jobs, new ambitions and resentments come to the fore.

As these workers migrate and come into contact with different ethnic groups and social classes, they are assaulted by the temptations of the pseudo-western city -- luxury cars, night clubs, gangs, pornographic movies. Moreover, their lives are plagued by frequent electricity blackouts, shortages of safe drinking water and poor handling of sewage.

Thus while Westerners romanticize globalization and nouveau riche entrepreneurs, they slight another pivotal, globalized class of the post-cold war world: a growing, industrialized subproletariat that surrounds the great cities not only of India but also of China, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan and other countries.

Whatever language they speak, whatever their skin color or religion, these new inhabitants of the third-world city have similar desires. Many resent the distant national governments that cannot provide them with basic necessities. They are creating new political communities, including religious and ethnic ones. It is notable that the Hindu extremists in India who burned down mosques in the early 1990's and attacked Christians in the late 1990's were for the most part clad in cheap western-style polyester outfits rather than traditional clothes, and came from the working quarters of India's industrialized landscape rather than from its villages.

While the vibrancy and flexibility of India's democracy have been duly celebrated in the West, the thuggery and ballot-rigging that goes on in local elections throughout this new India, along with the rise of regional and sectarian parties at the expense of secular and national ones, are not taken seriously enough. Even as governing authority is weakened by change, the Hindu nationalist government now in power reflects the severe religious ideologies of an angry working class.

India, though never truly stable or tightly controlled to begin with, is becoming increasingly an assemblage of region-states, city-states and tribal entities. Fortunately, this change is occurring slowly enough to avoid cataclysm. But when there is a state in the southwest like Kerala, with literacy and birthrates nearly at first-world levels, and a state like Bihar in the northeast, which is as poor and dysfunctional as anyplace in the third world, then the very notion of India as a single entity becomes all the more disputable.

Foreign policy may be the medium through which the Indian government can most easily assert primacy. As India's governing complexities mount, "the bomb" and the perceived willingness to use it loom brighter as a totem of state legitimacy: "Because we have the bomb, we are an advanced and unified state -- not merely a culturally rich and dynamic civilization!" (A similar scenario holds for China, where the expansion of the subproletariat and the government's trouble exerting control in too many places at once are going hand-in-hand with belligerence toward Taiwan.)

Thus the argument of recent weeks that President Clinton's trip should be used to convince India that it, as the stable and growing power in the region, should take the initiative in calming relations with its crumbling neighbor Pakistan misses the point. It is the challenge of modernity itself that is making India so bellicose.

This is not to play down the crisis in Pakistan. Whereas India's democratic system has at least earned legitimacy through longevity, Pakistan's history is littered with the wreckage of military regimes and ill-fated democratic experiments. While India's religious and ethnic divisions are subtle, complex and not prone to territorial solutions -- Hindus, Muslims and others are sufficiently dispersed to make secession impractical -- Pakistan is somewhat more easily divided: Sindhis in the south, Punjabis in the northeast, Baluchis in the southwest, Pathans in the northwest. More significant, anarchy in Afghanistan has destabilized Pakistan through the flow of drugs and weapons across the border.

Pakistan's democratic leaders in the 1990's -- feudal lords more than real politicians -- destroyed the fabric of civil society. There is no going back to that system, at least not in the immediate future. On the other hand, its military and intelligence community is compromised by extremist elements that, among other things, provide support for Islamic holy warriors fighting India in Kashmir. Americans delude themselves if they think the choice is between democracy and dictatorship in Pakistan. For the moment, the choice is between Gen. Pervez Musharraf's relatively benign and tenuous dictatorship and some theocratic nightmare.

The last thing General Musharraf needs is a lecture about swiftly holding elections. It took decades before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's military rule in Turkey provided the institutional base for successful democratic experimentation, and Pakistan today is as complex and unstable as Ataturk's Turkey. Because Pakistan's regime is so precarious, its reliance on the prestige of nuclear weapons is as great, if not greater, than India's.

These two countries are prime examples of the transition many nations in the developing world are undergoing as they become more fractured and urbanized, and poorer in basic resources. Some states, here and there, will unravel. We can live with that. What we cannot live with are large failed states with nuclear weapons. Therefore, the last thing we should want are weak populist regimes -- democratic or not -- that may act on impulse to legitimize themselves.