Sixty years ago this week, India and Pakistan won their independence - and saw it quickly overshadowed by one of the most violent upheavals of the 20th century as the departing British split the subcontinent.
Some 10 million people moved across borders in one of history's largest mass migrations as the princely states sewn together in 200 years of British rule were split into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Neighbor attacked neighbor and mobs set upon trains and lines of fleeing marchers in the sectarian riots and fighting surrounding partition.
The fasting and pleas for peace of Mohandas Gandhi, the revered independence leader, were of little avail. Estimates of the dead ranged from 200,000 to over one million, and a year after independence Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.
The mass bloodshed was only the beginning of the South Asian neighbors' hostility. They marked 20 years of independence not long after the second of their three wars. The 50th anniversary came a year before tit-for-tat nuclear tests that many feared presaged even worse tragedies.
But with the 60th anniversary - marked on Tuesday in Pakistan and on Wednesday in India - a rivalry that grew into one of the world's most dangerous is finally mellowing. India and Pakistan are now grappling less with each other than with their own aspirations and problems.
Pakistan, a nation of 160 million, is embroiled in a violent struggle between moderates and Islamic extremists. At stake is the identity of the world's second most populous Muslim state.
India is racing to become an economic powerhouse. Lightning growth has transformed the country and fueled a consumer boom. But many of its 1.1 billion people have been left behind - Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than African ones, and the country is home to about a third of the people across the world who live on less than $1 a day.
Mutual animosity lingers across the subcontinent, a territory stretching nearly 1,900 miles from Pakistan's mountainous North West Frontier Province to India's steamy southern tip. But attitudes are changing.
"I don't think that for my sons, Pakistan looms like it did for people like me," says Devraj Kumar, 61, an Indian army veteran who fought four decades ago against Pakistani troops in the mountains of disputed Kashmir. He was born a year before partition.
"We lived in a small village. The new border was so close. My father said that he saw miles and miles of trucks and cars, all kinds of vehicles. There were many more people walking. There was butchery - but my father never wanted to talk of those things," Kumar said.
His family settled in New Delhi, India's capital, where he lived what for his generation was the Indian dream: He joined the army, went to college and took a government job - "not much pay but always a paycheck."
The younger generation has moved beyond wanting mere economic security.
Kumar's sons "are focused on their business, on the rest of the world. One is living in America. All of them want money," he says, speaking over the hum of air conditioning at his eldest son's apartment.
Ten stories down, on the streets of Gurgaon, a seemingly ever-growing New Delhi suburb, the mind-set of today's India is on display.
And like nearly everything else in this teeming country, the scale is staggering.
There are brightly lit malls, glass office towers housing some of the biggest names in India and global business, and apartment blocks that offer India's version of suburban living.
The other side of India, the one that isn't being transformed, is there as well: the army of laborers constructing the dream homes that go for upward of $100,000.
Most of the workers are migrants from eastern and southern India - a wide swath of farmland and forests wracked by poverty and a growing communist insurgency that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the biggest threat to the country's stability and newfound prosperity.
"We build big houses and live in shacks," a laborer named Mohinder says as he hauls bricks through a construction site turned muddy by monsoon rains. He makes 3,000 rupees ($75) a month to support his wife and three children.
If India's biggest battle is over giving everyone a piece of the economic pie, Pakistan's main fight is in many ways over its very identity.
Both inherited robust legal and parliamentary traditions from the British. But while India's democratic institutions have remained strong, Pakistan has lurched between corrupt civilian governments and military rule, making its people deeply cynical of politics. Internal conflicts are increasingly viewed through the prism of religion and ever more violent.
The latest symbol of the conflict is the Red Mosque in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. There the army fought last month against pro-Taliban clerics and militant supporters waging a vigilante anti-vice campaign to impose Islamic law on secular Pakistanis.
The 10-day siege left 102 people dead. In the weeks since, militants have launched reprisal attacks, including two suicide bombings that have killed 29 people in Islamabad.
Mohammed Imran Ghauri, 29, shows the spot where a bomber struck outside his open-air restaurant July 27, targeting police sipping tea about 300 yards from the mosque.
He points to where the suicide bomber's torso landed. In all, 13 people died, including one restaurant worker. Three of his nephews remain in hospital.
"This a conflict between extreme people and the government, and we ordinary people are paying for that," says Ghauri, who narrowly escaped injury in the blast. He shook his head as he eyed dried blood spattered on the ceiling.
But many residents sympathize with the aims of radical clerics who had controlled the Red Mosque - even if their campaign has triggered more of the violence that has tormented northwest Pakistan since al-Qaida and Taliban put down roots there after the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
The vigilantes "just wanted to clean up the immorality, like prostitution. What's wrong with trying to stop it?" said Javed Kashmiri, a 45-year-old photo shop owner - one of many who see religion as offering solutions for the failings of government.
Increasingly, frustration over Pakistan's political instability and security woes is targeted at President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a moderate. He has won support for trying to bring peace with India, but draws contempt for failing to restore democracy after eight years in power.
"I don't feel threatened by outside forces anymore," said Malik Mehboob Elahi, who helped carry off the dead from the bombing. "We are threatened by our own government, by the internal situation."
In years past, blame for a terrorist attack would have been cast on archenemy India. Animosity persists, but a peace process begun in 2004 has eased tensions - and started bringing together two peoples who essentially share one broad South Asian culture.
On Monday Pakistan marked the anniversary by releasing 134 Indian prisoners, mostly fishermen or people who said they had strayed across the border by mistake. Some had been held for years. On Tuesday India was to reciprocate by releasing about 100 Pakistanis.
There have been cricket matches between India's and Pakistan's teams, border crossings have been reopened and a Pakistani starlet even played a leading role in a Bollywood film - albeit one that was banned in Pakistan for being too racy.
The peace process has also weathered a series of bombings in India - all of which New Delhi blames on Islamic militants based in Pakistan.
Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Singh - the former ironically born in New Delhi and the latter in what is now Pakistan - have even declared the peace process "irreversible."
It's a sentiment shared by millions on either side of the border.
"The hostility between India and Pakistan must end," says I.A. Rehman, a leading Pakistani human rights activist. "We must learn to be good neighbors. And I'm optimistic. People cannot be foolish forever."
Pennington reported from Islamabad, and Rosenberg from Gurgaon. AP's Sam Dolnick contributed from New Delhi.
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