Sixty years on, must the old enmities linger?

If he had foreseen the million-plus deaths that followed the separation of Pakistan and India in 1947 and the all-out war in 1971 which led to the foundation of Bangladesh in the east, would he have continued with his campaign of peaceful non co-operation with the British?

Ramindar Singh MBE is a Sikh well known to the people of Bradford. A former Bradford College lecturer and JP, he was also joint deputy chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. His family was in India during the period of transition from 1947.

He said: "The role of Gandhi is still very controversial. One view is that he did not want separation of Hindus and Muslims. Another view is that he wanted the religious philosophy of Hinduism, based on the Gita, to predominate.

"If there had been no independence and no separation, I think ordinary Muslims would have enjoyed a better standard of living. Pakistan has not made the progress it perhaps should have made; before independence the Punjab was very prosperous."

Mohammed Ajeeb CBE is even better known. A Muslim, he is a former Lord Mayor of Bradford - Britain's first Asian Lord Mayor - deputy leader of Bradford's Labour Group and Parliamentary candidate for Bradford North. He came to Britain from Pakistan in the 1950s.

He said: "India is more stable politically than Pakistan because democracy has stronger roots there. In Pakistan, being smaller, it is easier for the military to come to power and that is still the case.

"But I disagree with Ramindar Singh's analysis. In Pakistan the average person is reasonably well off, nobody is starving. In India the gap between the poor and the rich is still enormous and there is discrimination against other classes, particularly the Untouchables."

The anniversaries offer an opportunity to reassess more objectively than has formerly been the case the effects of the British Empire on the sub-continent.

For the past 20 years or more the propaganda has been against; imperialism has become a dirty word. All I can say is that India, now rivalling China as a new world power, doesn't seem to have done too badly out of the experience, just as in the long run England gained more than she lost from domination by the more advanced cultures of Imperial Rome and French Normandy.

The anniversaries also offer an opportunity to assess the present and speculate about the future.

Ramindar Singh, however, is inclined to think that British-based Indians won't spend too much time pondering the sub-continent's future.

"On the whole people like me think more about the future of Bradford and Britain than they do about India, whereas I think Pakistanis are looking too much back. The different attitudes to the 2005 earthquake is indicative of this. India said, We can deal with it'. But Pakistan needed outside help, especially from people in Bradford," he said.

Isn't one of the key differences between India and Pakistan, between Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, that Islam tends to be fatalistic; accepting that whatever happens is the will of Allah? Doesn't this explain why India is more economically go-ahead than Pakistan?

"Hinduism, like Islam, can be fatalistic; but individually Hindus have more of a business ethic. Now there are Indian multi-millionaires who are looking to invest in Britain. The movement is the other way: economically the Empire, the India part of it, is striking back. Economic progress is one way of accommodating the differences between Hindus and Sikhs," he added.

The number of millionaires in India is growing fast and is expected to exceed 1.1 million by 2009. Their combined wealth, it has been estimated by American Express, is likely to be in the region of 320 billion dollars. One can only hope that so much private wealth is spent well rather than wasted, as it is elsewhere, on status symbols and fripperies.

What of the disputed territory of Kashmir in the north and independent but troubled Bangladesh in the east?

Ajeeb is optimistic about the former. He said: "I think the peace process over Kashmir between India and Pakistan has already started. I hope in the next decade they will find a solution acceptable to Pakistanis, Indians and Kashmiris; either join control or intervention by the United Nations.

"India is very desperate to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council: that's why India has to clear her position over Kashmir."

And Bangladesh?

"Bangladesh has made good progress in education but economically it suffers because of its geography (the country is prone to floods) and there is much poverty," he added.

Ramindar Singh is more sceptical about the future of Kashmir. He is concerned about the bias against secularism that has been economically beneficial to India.

"To me it looks like the problem of religious fanaticism in Pakistan is becoming a bigger problem," he said, doubtless remembering the recent bloody conflict between President Pervez Musharraff's Government troops and religious acolytes of the Red Mosque.

"Pakistan has been used by countries such as the United States to help push out the Russians from Afghanistan. That might have helped the United States, but it hasn't helped the country itself," he added.

As for Bangladesh, he acknowledged Mohammed Ajeeb's point about education.

"The legacy of British developments in Bengal before partition in terms of education has been a good influence because standards were high," he said.

The points of difference between the Punjab in the west, where Pakistan is, and Bengal in the east, where Bangladesh is, escaped me despite the attention I paid to the news in 1971 when India defeated Pakistan and Bangladesh broke away. Punjab and Bengal are thousands of miles apart anyway; balancing the language and culture of the latter with the language and culture of the former was bound to be problematic given the different religious mixes of the two populations and the colonial influences of the past.

As a whole the Indian Sub-Continent has been a source of deep and abiding fascination with generations of British people, as had the United States, but with this difference. The Americans expelled the British Empire from its shores in 1776; the Indians took another 171 years to do the same.

In both cases, however, the link with Britain was not severed. Cultural ties and political alliances served this country well through two world wars. In the Second World War, more than 2.3 million men and women volunteered for the Indian armed forces to help the Britain and her allies. More than 24,300 were killed on active service. Without India's loyal support Britain might have failed against the Japanese.

Culturally the influences of the sub-continent upon Britain have been many, various and abiding. Following the path blazed by The Beatles and the Maharishi, my generation hitch-hiked to India. Music and food, philosophy, art, clothing and most recently films, pervade the towns and cities of this country. I had my first Indian meal at a Taj Mahal or Omar Khayam. The culture of India drifts like incense through some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, principally The Sign of Four and The Speckled Band.

What of the future?

Ramindar Singh believes that economic progress will override cultural and religious differences within India, but is sceptical about the future of Pakistan.

Mohammed Ajeeb takes a more sanguine view of the sub-continent. He said: "I can foresee some sort of co-operation, like we have in Europe with the European Union. That kind of economic co-operation might extend to South East Asian countries. India will be a major world power within 20 to 30 years and will have China as a rival."

Some already worry with single-minded anxiety about the effects of rampant material progress on the world's climate, environment, population and international relations; but which country is going to say no' and what sanctions are they prepared to use to block progress?

In spite of disasters, natural and man-made, the world has proved to be resilient. If it can withstand the effects of all the wars, tornadoes and volcanic eruptions of the 20th century, I am sure it can survive for at least another 60 years a bit of progress on the Indian sub-continent.