Sixty years is the age of wisdom, said Confucius, when all things can be seen clearly. Picasso, unsurprisingly, took a more flippant view; 60 for him was the age when we could start to be truly young – except that by then it was too late.

Pakistanis marked Independence Day yesterday in a grimly introspective mood. What they see most clearly is that their country's institutional, religious and social confrontations are no longer separate aspects of Pakistan’s complex political identity. They have acquired critical mass.

India turns 60 today determined to demonstrate that it is never too late to be young. The nation has a dancing step, an élan that eluded independent India until well into middle age. The “permit Raj” of state controls that for years held back growth is not yet defunct, but the guiding force is Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Twenty years ago, casual travellers would not have found India and Pakistan to be wildly different. Guidebooks listed obvious differences: Muslim Pakistan, Hindu-plus-a-little-bit-of-everything India; democracy stifled in Pakistan, flourishing in India. But they would have felt quite similar; crowded, ramshackle countries with stunning vistas, potholed roads and safe streets. Today the world sees only contrast.

Veterans lament lost ideals of Jinnah

As it celebrates 60th anniversary, the former British colony is caught in a struggle between democracy and dictatorship

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Pakistan’s history has been a triumph of experience over hope. Democracy has been cheated, and the great civic virtue of tolerance eroded, by self-perpetuating civil and military elites, alternately sharing and disputing power. Outside this charmless circle are a disempowered and frustrated middle class, and, treated with cavalier contempt, the poor and calamitously illiterate majority. It is often noted that the military has ruled Pakistan for 35 of the past 60 years, but less often observed that the corrupt and self-serving political barons from the landowning class that carved up the spoils for the other 25 years treated democracy as their cash cow. Like other generals before him, Pervez Musharraf is rapidly losing public support, but when he took power eight years ago promising that “true” democracy would replace the fraudulent version foisted on Pakistan, people knew precisely what he meant.

Yet India has its own backlog of failures, a combination of too much government – all that red tape – and too little government – disgraceful neglect of such public goods as education, and an inexplicable indifference to the maintenance of roads, railways and drains. Democracy famously thrives, but accountability is another matter. The contrasts are not quite as clear-cut as appears.

Politically Pakistan is in crisis, yet it is growing at 7 per cent, not all that far below India’s 9 per cent. Growth is strong even in Bangladesh, the young and equally crisis-torn half-sister of Midnight’s Children. The origins of the paradigm shift in India’s prospects lie in the market reforms pioneered in the 1990s by Manmohan Singh, then the Indian Finance Minister. There is no inherent reason why liberalisation should not work as well for India’s neighbours – particularly if India were to encourage reform by unilaterally lowering its barriers to South Asian trade.

Indians have embraced globalisation with genuine enthusiasm; the country must now embrace free trade. Protectionism is a blast from India’s sluggish past that sits ill with its new dynamism. India seems almost proud to have played deal breaker in the Doha Round of global trade talks. It has obtained almost everything it wanted from its partners and must now turn deal maker. Live a little, India: you are only young twice.