Two countries with a common and ancient civilization, India and Pakistan, celebrated 60 years of independence from colonial rule this week. At the time of independence, both countries were in danger of collapsing from internal and external threats. This greatly influenced both countries' subsequent turn toward centralism - in India's case, statism, and in Pakistan's case, army rule.

For four decades, both statism and army rule seemed irreversible. This was despite failures across the board: In both countries, territory was lost and the economy stagnated. Resources were spent on developing nuclear weaponry and on dealing with the Kashmir insurgency, which was fostered by Pakistan and repressed by India. What was left was often wasted through corruption. By 1990, it was common for Pakistan to be labeled a failed state and India, perhaps more damningly, a failed democracy.

Pakistan's army and feudal landlords, who shared political power via an informal coalition throughout the first 40 years, deserve most of the blame for Pakistan's failures. They carved up the economy among themselves, and let the poor survive by growing food and providing simple services to the rich. India's greater failures hid these strategies from national or global attention. Pakistan even overtook India for a while until Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's nationalizations of the 1970s brought them on par again.

Pakistan, a day older than India, but with an even younger population, seems to have aged more poorly over the past two decades. As the Indian economy picks up speed on the back of the 1991 reforms, India is on its way to becoming a global player in services and acquiring as formidable a reputation as China for job creation. The IT sector alone creates three new jobs every minute of each working day. In the four statistics that really matter - literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality rates and the female-to-male ratio - only in the last does Pakistan perform better than India and that, too, marginally. In the others, it is substantially worse.

There is no single reason for Pakistan's poorer performance. It turned as reformist as India in the 1990s. This has benefited some parts of its economy. For instance, the country adds over 2.5 million new cell phone users each month, or 1 for every second of the day. Though below India's rate of 2.7 new cell phone users per second, it is a much better ratio to the population.

Religious fervor is often accused, but has not - in either the subcontinent's history or in Pakistan's shorter one - been a barrier to development. Despite incidents such as led to the recent siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, theocratic parties have never received more than 15 percent of the popular vote - and that was three decades ago. Evidence within all the countries of South Asia provides proof of the proposition that the poor, regardless of faith or ethnicity, seek the means of development, particularly the acquisition of education. Muslims are no exception to this proposition. For instance, the first administrative district to reach 100 percent literacy in the subcontinent was the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram in the Indian state of Kerala.

Finally, one cannot simply blame performance on Pakistan not being a full democracy. The world abounds with more failed than successful democracies, while China provides the most stunning counterexample of a successful dictatorship. Pakistan's current state of governance - in which the military, the courts and parliament share power and the press is relatively free - has been achieved through decades of negotiation and may well be the best framework given its current stage of political maturity.

Yet, there is one difference that may be the real reason for Pakistan's backwardness, and it is now becoming evident - again, by comparison with India. It is linked to bad governance but does not always follow from the democratic tradition. The difference is, in a word, freedom. India provides a good example: The government used to decide how resources were spent, leaving citizens with few choices on careers, education and lifestyles - on participation in their nation's growth. Since the 1990s, the Indian state has worked hard to give its citizens more freedom. The result is an invigorated India.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has moved slowly on freedom. The state has withdrawn from the economy, but now grants favors selectively to the private sector, with the inevitable corollary of massive corruption and loss of freedom of action.

This suggests that Pakistan is only a crucial freedom step away from success. In reality, the immediate future does not look promising because the country's citizens do not have the political will to achieve real change. It is a sad commentary that Pakistan's choices for the next cycle of political rule look like bad ones: the continuation of the present system of quasi-military rule or its replacement with the destructive feudal forces that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif represent. Surely, Pakistan's citizens deserve much better - something worth pondering as their nation celebrates turning 60.

Reprinted with permission by The San Jose Mercury News.

Japan's ruling party suffered a historic defeat Sunday. For the first time since the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was formed in 1955, an opposition party has become the largest party in the upper house.

The powerful message delivered by Japanese voters has significant implications not only for Japan but also for the rest of the world, not least for its close ally, the United States.

The election result revives momentum in Japan toward creation of a viable two-party system, potentially ending the conservative postwar monopoly on power. Japanese voters expressed deep anxiety about the impact of economic change upon their treasured social order. They embraced the campaign of the Democratic Party (the main opposition) against growing income inequality and the failure of the state to take care of an aging population.

Equally important, the vote was a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's agenda of giving priority to revising Japan's antiwar Constitution and allowing its military to take on a global role in support of the US. Democratic Party leader Ichiro Ozawa effectively portrayed Mr. Abe as a man out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Japanese. But he also articulated an alternative vision of Japan's international role, calling for closer ties to its Asian neighbors and sending troops overseas only under the auspices of United Nations peacekeeping missions.

Since 9/11, Japan has been among the most loyal, if not unquestioning, of US allies. It sent troops to Iraq, provided logistical support to the war in Afghanistan, and outdid the US in putting pressure on North Korea. Most recently, Abe echoed the rhetoric of the Bush administration, calling for formation of a "values-based" alliance of democracies along with India and Australia, implicitly aimed at containing a rising China. The election results will certainly slow, if not reverse, this tight synchronization.

For the business community, the vote will raise concerns that needed economic policy actions such as fiscal reforms will get stalled in a gridlocked parliament. The vote reminds politicians that the economic recovery has left an awful lot of Japanese behind, with real wages falling, youth unemployment high, and the elderly drawing down their savings to survive. Abe's feel-good rhetoric and focus on security just angered those Japanese.

There remains strong support for gradual change. Most Japanese want the country to take on a more "normal" security role, but one that will stop far short of overdrawn fears of a remilitarized Japan. And many Japanese, particularly in the younger generation, back economic reform, though not at the expense of social stability.

The most intriguing question is the future of Japan's democracy. Abe is resisting calls for his resignation, attributing the vote to a series of scandals in his Cabinet and most of all to the revelation that the government's national pension system had lost the records of some 50 million people. The election result was bad luck, Abe claimed, not a repudiation of his administration's overall policies -- a view shared by Washington policymakers.

Exit polls do confirm that voters were strongly motivated by these issues. But they also express little faith in the personal leadership of Abe, who tried to cover up the pension debacle. He suffered from an unfavorable comparison to his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, one of Japan's most popular postwar leaders.

But the election suggests that Mr. Koizumi's personal charisma only temporarily reversed a longer trend of drift away from the ruling conservatives, particularly by unaffiliated swing voters in Japan's cities and suburbs. Mr. Ozawa, one of Japan's most brilliant politicians, managed to both regain those voters and steal away traditional conservative backers in rural areas among farmers and pensioners worried about their future.

Ozawa, whom I have known for more than two decades, is a man of uncommon political vision. He is a former LDP stalwart who has relentlessly pursued the goal of creating a clearly defined two-party system that can create real competition. He was the architect of a split in the LDP that briefly brought the opposition to power in the early 1990s.

Over dinner last fall, Ozawa laid out to me what seemed then like an incredibly audacious plan to regain power. First to win a series of local elections, leading up to a defeat of the LDP in the upper house election, forcing in turn the dissolution of the lower house and new elections. He clearly hopes to split the LDP again and pry away its coalition partner, the New Komeito Party, as part of his strategy of realignment.

The Democratic Party has yet to demonstrate its own ability to rule, but it would be unwise to underestimate Ozawa. And it would be foolish to dismiss the desire for change delivered by Japanese voters on Sunday.

Reprinted with permission by the Christian Science Monitor.