India’s politicians are uncharacteristically exercising restraint and refusing to speculate over who was behind the fourth major terrorist attack on Mumbai in eight years.
“We are not pointing our fingers, at this stage, at this group or that group,” India’s Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told a news conference Thursday, as forensic experts sifted through the wreckage at three bomb sites in India’s financial capital.
“All angles will be examined without any pre-determination. All groups hostile to India are on the radar,” he said of the hunt for those who killed 17 people and maimed 137 others Wednesday.
That is a notable departure from previous terrorist attacks in India, when police and politicians rushed to name possible Islamist groups behind the outrages and blamed Pakistan for supporting terrorism.
But the difference this time around may not be so much a new found sense of trust as it is fear South Asia could be plunged into a dangerous period of uncertainty and tension.
Wednesday’s attacks couldn’t have come at a worse time for the region, as Pakistan flirts with violent disintegration and economic collapse. Meanwhile, regional alliances are being strained by the growing rift between Islamabad and Washington following the discovery and killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden practically on the doorstep of Pakistan’s main military academy.
A Taliban insurgency continues to simmer in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghanistan border and raging street battles between rival political groups in Pakistan’s commercial capital, Karachi, have killed more than 200 people in the last two weeks.
A confrontation with India over yet another terrorist attack may push Pakistan over the brink.
“Given the current uncertainty within the Pakistan military and volatile situation inside Pakistan, Indian leaders may be loath to escalate tensions with Pakistan,” said Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert with Washington’s Heritage Foundation.
Since February, Indian and Pakistani leaders have been trying to rebalance their relationship, after it nearly resulted in conflict following the last major terrorist attack on Mumbai, when trained assassins from Pakistan laid siege to the city centre for 60 hours in November 2008 and killed 166 people.
The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks prompted Pakistan to withdraw thousands of troops deployed against the Taliban on the border with Afghanistan and move them to the border with India.
It also resulted in India cutting off diplomatic contacts with Pakistan for almost two years.
But after restarting a stuttering peace process in February, India and Pakistan’s foreign ministers met in Islamabad last month and agreed on some confidence building measures.
Pakistan’s newly appointed foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is scheduled to visit New Delhi in ten days to resume those talks with India’s foreign minister S.M. Krishna.
But Wednesday’s bombings could complicate those contacts.
“There has been positive momentum in terms of bilateral relations and my worry is that an incident of this kind could cause that to deteriorate, whoever is responsible,” warned Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
Wednesday’s bombings may have been designed to do just that.
“India has engaged with Pakistan in a peace process in the last five months; there have been signs that both countries want to work towards durable peace,” said Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Militants could feel that this would be a threat to them, if there is successful engagement between India and Pakistan.”
Improved India-Pakistan relations could threaten Pakistani terrorist groups who have thrived on tension between the two countries.
More than six decades of mistrust and animosity have bred an almost instinctive hostility between India and Pakistan when it comes to terrorism.
By stirring up old animosities, Pakistani terrorist might also buy themselves some relief from the pressure the United States has been putting on Islamabad to step up its fight against Islamist jihadists.
“One immediate outcome of Wednesday’s bombing is certain to be that the Pakistani military’s inclinations will be to stay focused on India rather than the militants, who maintain close ties to segments of the Pakistani armed forces and the intelligence service,” said James Dorsey, a researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
No one has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bombings, which Indian police now say were caused by sophisticated improvised explosives devices made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
Some security experts have said a prime suspect in the case may be the radical Muslim group Indian Mujahideen, which first emerged in 2007 claiming responsibility for a series of bomb attacks in northern India.
Indian Mujahideen has ties to the Pakistani terror group Lakshar-e-Taiba, which was behind the 2008 Mumbai massacres, and is widely regarded as one of the few home-grown Indian terror groups capable of launching simultaneous, high casualty attacks.
Only in this case, the group has not sent its traditional trademark e-mail to media outlets claiming credit for the attacks.
National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
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