By all accounts, visiting Pakistan has been a wonderful experience - the most favoured adjective being 'overwhelming' - for Indians coming to watch the cricket here. Whatever they expected, they weren't quite prepared for the spontaneous warmth and hospitality they encountered.

Should this have been surprising? Both countries have demonized each other but, speaking for Pakistan, it's a fact little recognized in India that, except at the hands of the hard-core fringe standing guard over the 'ideology of Pakistan', the demonizing of India stopped a long time ago.

Official policies are a different matter. Kashmir too falls in a category all its own. Post-1989 Kashmir, in any case, was a problem invented and manufactured by Indian ineptitude. Pakistan merely exploited it although, in all fairness, it went on exploiting it even when no one was quite sure what the ultimate objective was.

But virulent, knee-jerk anti-Indianism, a part of the national psyche for much of Pakistan's formative years, or the "Crush India" stickers pasted on vehicles in Lahore during the 1971 war, became discarded notions long ago.

Lost amongst Pakistan's jihadi image is the little-appreciated circumstance that in important respects the country has moved on. Certainly as far as India is concerned, it is no longer slave to the old shibboleths. Considering that the official 'enemy' was India and that the real or perceived threat from India has defined Pakistan's national security posture, this is not a minor change.

Cricket hasn't created anything new. It hasn't begotten feelings or emotions not there before. It has only held up a gleaming mirror to reality. For a record number of Indians it provided an opportunity to step beyond standard, everyday demonology and experience at first hand feelings at the popular level they never knew existed.

If Pakistanis in large numbers visit India it will be a learning experience for them too. Taxis will not refuse fares nor shopkeepers lower their prices, no fear of that happening.

But they'll probably learn something about the vastness of India, its new concerns centred on growth, commerce and industry and the fact that whereas Pakistan can be a convenient whipping boy in times of crisis, India has too much on its plate to spend too much time thinking about Pakistan. The old cliche, about travel being a wonderful education never more applied than to our two countries.

Pakistan, however, has moved on in other respects as well. Contrary to what Pakistan's official posture might lead someone to conclude, two other emotions define the Pakistani mood today. One, a profound distaste for the role of American lackey, the other, an equally profound yearning for -- and this is a shorthand word for a variety of objectives -- democracy.

Pakistan has lost what appetite it had for being governed by the old fears. Which doesn't mean there's any sentiment for appeasement or bidding farewell to Kashmir. At the same time all the evidence suggests a quantum leap towards the realization that Pakistan's best interests are served by a normal, sensible relationship with India, one veering between misplaced sentimentalism and pre-programmed hatred.

While entertaining warm feelings for the United States (there's never been any visceral anti-Americanism in Pakistan), Pakistanis feel humiliated at the spectacle of their country acting as an American toady.

The religious parties aside, Pakistanis were never pro-Taliban, their governments were. Just as it is not the people of Pakistan who are pro-Bush, only the Musharraf government.

The people of Pakistan have remained steady. It is Pakistani governments, tinpot affairs for the most part, which have been buffeted by the winds of inconsistency. But who suffers the bad image? Pakistan and its people.

What accounts for the yearning for democracy and for rule by other than khaki? Not any emotional longing for the return of either of the two parties which between them mucked up Pakistan's ill-starred decade of democracy, 1988-99.

Not love for democracy in principle or as theory but a growing weariness with authoritarianism because of the disasters it has meant in practice. When concerned Pakistanis talk democracy, they are consulting not Montesquieu or Mill but their own experience.

There's also the growing awareness that Pakistan is most at risk from banana republic status when the military is in command. Pakistan's history testifies to this linkage.

On India we are witnessing a remarkable convergence of perceptions between the popular mood and the national security establishment. In what is a first in the history of Pakistan, both want the clouds of hostility to part.

The popular mood has been like this for some time. The security establishment has come round to this new way of thinking, thanks to American sponsorship and tutelage.

If September 11 had not happened and the Americans had not shown the way, the presidential kitchen cabinet -- the four or five men, including the president, who constitute the ruling politburo -- would have been still belting out the old choruses.

On this count at least banana republicanism has served Pakistan well. Without American prodding the old India tunes, the golden oldies with which the high command was most comfortable, would not have changed.

But that's about it. The American alliance may have its peripheral benefits but most Pakistanis don't look with much favour or pride at the way their country has become identified as a pliable instrument in American hands. The Wana operation is a case in point.

It has been widely condemned because of the perception (1) that it was carried out at American behest and (2) that it was ill-prepared and poorly executed, leading to unnecessary casualties.

This picture of national disorder, of a national security machine out of synch with the national mood, is behind the demands for a political opening which heals the country's political fissures and allows the two mainstream parties, the PPP and the PML-N, to play their rightful role in national affairs.

If the presidential kitchen cabinet had a monopoly on wisdom, it would have been another matter. But its record being less than infallible, the argument becomes stronger for giving a new direction to a political system barely chugging along, a hybrid neither fish now fowl, neither presidential nor parliamentary.

The president's reluctance on this score is hard to understand. His own position is secure and won't come under threat even if Shahbaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto return to the country.

Pakistan will look good and its stock as a democracy can only improve in the international community. The return of the two stalwarts should also be good for the king's party, the Q League, because it will have to look out for itself and improve its performance in order to survive.

What are the guardians of national security afraid of? Have they so little confidence in themselves that they think that if the PPP and the PML-N get going, their house of cards will fall? Doesn't say much for their courage or for the strength of the system they have so proudly spawned.

Consider what our history has been. Every authoritarian figure has left the country worse off than he found it. And with the fall or departure of every strongman the country, instead of moving ahead, has gone back to the beginning, to square one.

Gen Musharraf has so much going for him. He has his qualities and, as has been noted time and again, he has presided over a remarkably tolerant dispensation.

No military figure, not even a political figure, has taken criticism the way he has, which is a great thing. He's a smart man but someone who is refusing to rise above his circumstances. And refusing to take the risks which alone can give him true leadership status.

TAILPIECE: What on earth is being done to the PML-N leader, Javed Hashmi? It was a mistake arresting him. It is doing no one any good keeping him locked up and trying him for sedition, of all things. It's high time this farce ended.