I tend to agree with you, I love India and even if it has many flaws (I think corruption is the worst), it is fascinating and very diverse place which is considered biggest democracy in the world. Can't comment on Pakistan since I was never there, but I would expect more homogeneous place. And I guess everybody heard about ISI supporting terrorist groups and fueling problems in Kashmir.

I don't think though it makes sense to try to paint every single conflict as good-vs-bad, democracy-vs-dictatorship, since you can easily have full democracies fighting each other for any possible reason (imagine potentially UK-France, Yugoslavia breakup or anything else)