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From : Letters to the Editor section, Published in The Dawn , Pakistan,6 Dec 08 READING Qamar Iqbal's letter, 'Mumbai: India blames Pakistan' , and the several reports titled , (i) ' India sending top official to US' , (ii) 'The misplaced hype about Faridko't , (iii) 'Gunmen spoke Hindi with strong Punjabi, north Indian accent' and (iv) 'Taj hotel was warned of attack' , (all in Dawn's Dec 1 issue), only strengthened my earlier conclusions. Going by some of the past actions of the Indians, I had already suspected that the attacks on Mumbai had been engineered by New Delhi in order to ward off the immense and increasing pressure it has been coming under on two accounts. First, the peaceful and massive uprising in Kashmir in recent months has caught the Indian establishment and even the independence-minded Kashmiri leaders by surprise. What is worse, some Indian intellectuals and rights activists, too, are now demanding of their leaders...

Raid involving the taking of hostages suggests only marginal link to al-Qaida The Mumbai attacks are unique in the history of recent violent militancy, Islamist or otherwise. As Indian security agencies race to work out who was behind them they will be negotiating a maze of conflicting clues. A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed the operation. The name indicates a local group - the Deccan is the central Indian plateau - and a probable link to the Indian Mujahideen who started a bloody bombing campaign a year ago. It is this group, too, that threatened the people of Mumbai with "deadly attacks" two months ago and has credibly claimed responsibility for the series of attacks in recent months. Its texts are full of references to early Islamic history and key thinkers who are characteristic of modern jihadist ideology. In the local version of the global Islamist militant discourse, the Crusader-Zionist alliance has been expanded to become the Hindu-Crusader-Zionis...