Pakistanis look so much like north Indians, and yet they are so different

For most Indian observers, Pakistan is an enigma. Visits by journalists are rare because visas are hard to obtain. They also tend to be hurried under pressure of deadlines, so that even those who are fortunate enough to go are often not able to range fully across the country and get a complete sense of what preoccupies the average Pakistani and what he thinks of India and his country's relations with the outside world.

The importance of this can hardly be understated. The promised supply of US arms and ominous news about its nuclear programme have thrust Pakistan to the centre of the South Asian stage, and it is clear that a new phase has begun in Indo-Pakistan relations which in the last decade have never quite fulfilled the faint promise held out at the 1972 Simla talks.

How does the average Pakistani view India? What are the compulsions which make officialdom in Islamabad act the way it does? What are the layman's perceptions of the two superpowers, of the Afghanistan imbroglio and of Pakistan's place in the world? What, in fact, is the truth about India's most important - and most belligerent - neighbour, whose armies have clashed with India's three times since the agony of Partition in 1947, ensuring that a strategic subcontinent has never really been free of the threat of war? Last month Bhabani Sen Gupta spent 24 days in Pakistan and talked with more than 100 Pakistanis ranging from top officials and scholars to businessmen and the man on the street. His report:

Flanked by the rocky hills of the Karakoram, fondled by the five great rivers of the Indus valley, Pakistan in 1981 is a cloaked, motionless tableau of 80 million people. It is a period piece of military dictatorship, harsh and abrasive; but, compared to many of the 80-odd military regimes in the Third World, not cruel, nor overly repressive. Except when it comes to the media: the press in Pakistan has never been muzzled so ferociously as it is now.

Beyond a lunatic fringe of India-haters in the armed forces and the clergy, no Pakistani can contemplate another war with India as a viable state policy. Pakistan has no lack of friends in the world. But it has always lacked the friend it needed most: a great power that would stake its muscles to defend it in times of danger.