Yesterday, as Indian and Pakistani soldiers stopped shooting at each other across the disputed border in Kashmir, their governments began blaming each other for breaking the peace of the past few years.

The Kashmir scrap is a more alarming development than even the weekend’s co-ordinated bombs in Ahmedabad and Bangalore (and yesterday’s arrests of suspects in Bombay, the financial capital. The comparative calm of the recent stage of this dispute which has persisted since Partition 61 years ago is to the credit of both governments, but especially that of Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s beleaguered President. He took the heat out of an issue of endless inflammatory potential for the Army (even though, as army chief, he had done much previously to stir it up). Yesterday’s exchange threatens a big step backwards.

Even that concern is less than the economic and political problems now afflicting India. For the past five years, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s problems have soaked up attention (and cash) from the US and Britain, while India’s smooth success has been taken for granted.

That is a mistake. Pakistan’s worsening threats certainly deserve whatever help can sensibly be devised. But India’s own struggles – and the disappointing response of the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who took office with such high hopes resting on him – are worth as much attention.

Times Archive, 1965: How the Kashmir War began

These countries were born in slaughter, disaster might have been in their stars

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Singh has some of the problems of Gordon Brown, except that he photographs as a more sympathetic figure, whether smiling while announcing economic growth rates, or looking upset and concerned, as in the past couple of days, visiting bomb victims. An economist by training and by experience at the International Monetary Fund, he was revered in Indian political life for his stewardship, as Finance Minister in the 1990s, of the country’s economic transformation, which helped to double its growth rate. When an alliance led by the Congress Party won an unexpectedly high share of seats in the 2004 election, Sonia Gandhi, the party’s head, declined to be prime minister, acknowledging the opposition to her foreign birth. Instead, she anointed Singh.

But the respected technocrat proved a diffident and awkward politician. The only Prime Minister never to be elected directly to the Lower House of Parliament, he has fumbled in the higher office, ducking the challenges that would take great political skill to pull off.

He survived the recent no-confidence vote and probably rescued the new nuclear pact with the US, which a stronger politician would have secured more easily. There are many reasons to object to the deal – starting with the huge damage it does to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – but they are not on the Indian side. India wins more nuclear help with fewer strings than it deserves.

While Singh has been energetic on the politically easy tasks of putting money into welfare and education, he has backed away from those perennial problems, reforming state-owned industrial giants (at the cost of many jobs), loosening employment laws, improving energy supplies and cutting subsidies. Those problems have helped to choke off the new businesses that will be needed to keep India’s growth near its recent 9 per cent. That level outstrips its still-high population growth (another problem) by enough that the benefits of the country’s wealth can plausibly be expected to continue to spread downwards.

With elections due by March, and an economy in danger from the global slowdown, it would be foolish to expect anything but populist tactics. But India still needs these reforms as badly as when Singh took office.

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