“The end of an era”, The Times called it. Britain in 1947 was in a grim “end of all things” mood. It had won the war, but two years on, the country was broke and profoundly demoralised. That August the Attlee Government had announced drastic cuts in meat, butter, petrol and grain rations, the motor industry could not meet export orders for lack of steel, equity markets had lost a quarter of their value since January, foreign exchange was desperately short and yet further controls over the economy were in the pipeline.

“Britain’s emergency” dominated headlines and national debate, not the Caesarean birth of India and Pakistan: the first a nation of, even then, a fifth of humanity, the second new-minted and destined, The Times predicted, to be the leading state of the Islamic world and “a rallying point for Muslim thought and aspirations”. The end of three centuries of British involvement in India occasioned flickers of regret for glory past, but by 1947 independence was seen as “the culmination of a natural process”. This newspaper expressed relief that the inevitable end of empire had been navigated “smoothly and swiftly”.

Swift the process of Partition had indeed been. The document dividing the sub-continent was drafted in a matter of hours. Smooth, it was not. Partition was a victory for no one except Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose life’s dream was the creation of an Islamic state. For Pandit Nehru’s Congress party, Partition was the antithesis of everything the independence movement stood for, a solution dictated by an eruption of intercommunal violence, edging on civil war, that killed a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and made millions more homeless. Partition itself ripped thousands of families apart. Yet it was not true partition: today there are 120 million Muslims in India, more than the population of Pakistan. In a humid bungalow in the grounds of the Viceroy’s palace in Delhi on the eve of independence, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the British jurist sent out from Britain to draw the partition line between India and Pakistan, reflected on his work. “Down comes the Union Flag on Friday and up goes — for the moment I rather forget what. Nobody in India will love me.” Britain’s main concern, at the end, was a reasonably dignified departure.

Doctors say that amputees suffer “ghost pain” from the missing limb. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence, not including the 60-year-old Kashmir dispute. When Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking east broke away in 1971, India was Bangladesh’s eager midwife. Each society is given to hostile or scornful outbursts against the other. India’s democracy has been assaulted only once, by Indira Gandhi; in Pakistan, democracy has shallow roots and political accountability barely exists. Yet, as Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf have at last had the wisdom to acknowledge, the countries of the sub-continent have strong interests in common that compel them to master their history.

Pakistan and Bangladesh need closer economic ties with their newly prospering neighbour. In India, the Islamist menace cannot be shrugged off as “Pakistan’s problem”; a victory for extremists in Pakistan would be a disaster for both. In 1947 India and Pakistan set up a Joint Defence Council to act as one in the face of common danger. Common danger is present. A continent’s destiny hinges on what action they take.