Ever since their birth as two separate countries in 1947, India and Pakistan have been psychologically obsessed with their assorted mutual conflicts. They have fought four conventional wars, and regularly display their nuclear capability to outpace and undermine each other.

From the outside, it resembles nothing so much as a family feud – and psychologically speaking, it’s a very apt analogy. Across the subcontinent, family and lineage are the most influential institutions in people’s lives, and people tend to transpose the psychological moral structure of their ...