Things are pretty calm in India. Its recent election of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh means that the world’s largest democracy will once again be led by a seasoned economist. And it all happened peacefully, fairly and relatively without incident.

By contrast, in Pakistan, the army is fighting to recapture territory from the Taliban and shore up a civilian government elected last year after an army general ruled for a decade. The Islamic fundamentalist militia has taken control of territory so close to the capital that there are international worries about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into terrorist hands.

These parallel events are enough to make anybody wonder how two neighboring countries, once part of the same British colony, could be so vastly different. And the answer is simply that India always knew what it wanted to be a secular democracy, and Pakistan knew it didn’t want to be India.

Singh has a soft voice, and his words can be boring, but he knows what he’s doing when it comes to the economy. On the news of his party’s triumph, India’s main stock market rose 17 percent in a day, despite the global recession.

In Pakistan, the man in charge of getting the country out of its shaky situation is a wheeler-dealer businessman who amassed most of his wealth while his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister. President Asif Ali Zardari, though, is not boring.

So how does it happen that two countries created at the same moment have come to be so different, while they share so much common history and ethnic heritage? How does much bigger, more diverse India wind up being the more stable country?

By the time the British botched the bloody partition of 1947 that divided the subcontinent, the founders of modern India had already decided what kind of nation they wanted to create. They had been working on the concept for at least two decades. Pakistan’s leaders are still, at this very moment, trying to figure out their nation’s identity.