Sixty years ago this week - at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 - Britain relinquished control of “the jewel in the crown” and the independent states of India and Pakistan were born.

Overnight, a subcontinent of some 400 million people was split in two, creating the world’s first Islamic republic to the north and east, and the world’s largest democracy to the south.

What followed was the biggest mass migration in human history as millions of Indian Muslims fled to Pakistan, and similar numbers of Hindus and Sikhs headed the other way.

Between 500,000 and a million people died in the rioting that accompanied it.

Six decades on, the events of 1947 still cast a grim shadow over the two tries, which have fought three wars since then and remain riddled with poverty, corruption and ethnic strife.

But now, for very different reasons, they have both reached turning points that could determine whether they shake off that bloody legacy and realise the dreams of their founding fathers.

When the two nations celebrated their 50th anniversaries in 1997, the celebrations were lavish, but of limited interest to the outside world.

India was still an economic backwater that had only just introduced market reforms liberating its private sector from the “licence Raj” of socialist central planning.

Pakistan was a democracy - albeit an unstable one - and concerns about its Islamic extremists were largely confined to Western intelligence agencies.

Neither country had the bomb – they conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998.

Today, both are armed with nuclear weapons - putting South Asia alongside the Korean peninsula as one of the world’s two biggest potential nuclear flashpoints.

And each is at the centre of the two major issues shaping the world today - the US-led war on terror and the economic rise of Asia.