As Sri Lanka’s armed forces battle the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in their last stronghold, the island country’s influential neighbour, India, is weighing diplomatic options to goad President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government to save civilians trapped in the war zone.

The number of civilians is estimated to be as high as 200,000 to 250,000. Many have been displaced by the war five or even 12 times over. Currently, according to the best estimates, 25 to 35 people are being killed every day.

India’s ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is under pressure from its constituents from the southern state of Tamil Nadu to go beyond verbal exhortations to Colombo to stop civilian killings, help evacuate the large numbers of stranded people by creating safe corridors, and “meet their humanitarian needs for relief materials, medicines and medical care”.

They want New Delhi to demand that Colombo declare a ceasefire, and reach badly needed relief to the trapped civilians.

Recently, India’s ethnic-Tamil parties threatened to resign en masse from the UPA, prompting Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to visit Colombo. New Delhi has repeatedly asked the Sri Lankan government to ensure the safety of Tamil civilians in the war zone.

However, the UPA government is keen to ensure that the LTTE is decisively defeated in the war. The group is banned in India for terrorist activities, including the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The Indian government is also reluctant to get embroiled too deeply in the Sri Lankan crisis, having burnt its fingers by intervening in Sri Lanka by sending in the Indian Peace- Keeping Force in 1987. This was a disaster, which failed to accomplish the objective of disarming the Tigers. The IPKF quit the island in ignominy in 1990.

India has joined the European Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross and human rights organisations in demanding an end to the civilian killings, and a political settlement of the Tamil question. The EU has also asked the LTTE to lay down arms and renounce violence.

But unlike the EU, New Delhi balks at calling for an immediate ceasefire. India continues to provide military assistance to the Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF), including radar surveillance, logistical support, armaments and helicopters.

“It is most unfortunate that the Sri Lankan government has exploited the absence of effective pressure from India to prosecute the war regardless of its human consequences,” says Anuradha Chenoy, a professor of international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University here.

The Colombo government has said that if the LTTE heeds the EU’s call to lay down arms, the need for “immediate ceasefire” to protect stranded civilians would not arise.

Meanwhile, the battle is taking an unacceptable toll of Tamil civilian lives. According to the international civil liberties group, Human Rights Watch, 2,000 Tamils have been killed and 5,000 wounded since the fall of Kilinocchhi, the LTTE’s administrative centre, in January.

Both sides are targeting civilians—the SLAF through indiscriminate bombing and shelling, and the LTTE by firing on them to prevent them from fleeing to safety. “This constitutes a complete violation of the laws of war and of international humanitarian law, which grant immunity to civilians,” says Chenoy.

The SLAF is keen to finish the war and declare victory before Sri Lanka’s New Year in April. This is likely to lead to a sharp increase in casualties among the more than 200,000 civilians trapped in the war zone, a 100-sq km strip.

Argue V. Suresh and D. Nagasaila of the People’s Union of Civil Liberies in Tamil Nadu: “As if to cover this up in advance, the SLAF is deliberately playing down the number of civilians originally living in the zone to 70,000. The Rajapakse government claims that half of them have already fled, although the actual number may be only a few hundred.”

They add: “In the coming days, Colombo may declare that all the civilians have escaped, leaving only the LTTE there. The SLAF can then legitimately launch a no-holds-barred final offensive, including firebombing, ostensibly to finish the LTTE. This is liable to lead to mass slaughter or a holocaust.”

As if to ensure India’s continuing support to the military operations and stave off its pressure for a political settlement, Sri Lankan army chief Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka recently highlighted the “threat” that the air wing of the LTTE poses to India.

Referring to last week’s attack by two LTTE aircraft on Colombo, the general warned that the Tigers’ planes could penetrate 150-170 km inside Indian territory. “This greatly exaggerates the threat,” says Chenoy.

The Lankan humanitarian crisis is deepening by the day. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW): “The Sri Lankan government has indicated that the ethnic Tamil population trapped in the war zone can be presumed to be siding with the LTTE and treated as combatants, effectively sanctioning unlawful attacks.”

Adds HRW: The SLAF have “repeatedly and indiscriminately shelled areas crowded with displaced persons”, including government-declared “safe zones” and “the remaining hospitals in the region.”

The SLAF is herding civilians into internment camps, masquerading as “welfare villages”. “The displaced persons, including entire families, detained in these… barbed-wire camps are denied their liberty and freedom of movement,” says HRW. “The plight of the region’s civilians has been made worse by the government’s decision in September 2008 to order most humanitarian agencies out…”.

The government has thrown a blanket of censorship over the war zone. It has failed to bring in enough food, medical supplies, and other relief and has only allowed a minimal role for the United Nations. Continued fighting, lack of oversight, and manipulation of the delivery of aid “have all contributed to the continuing humanitarian crisis,” says HRW.

While it wages an open war in the North, the Sri Lankan government has launched a dirty war in the Sinhalese-dominated South. Critics of the government are harassed, taken into illegal confinement, and “disappeared”, or like “The Sunday Leader” editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, gunned down.

On its part, the LTTE has proved ruthless towards the Tamils. With each battlefield defeat, it treats civilians with greater brutality.

According to a district official quoted by the Reuters news agency: “When people occupy particular places, the LTTE sends shells from that area, and then the army also targets the same area.”

The LTTE also subjects civilians, including children, to forced recruitment and deadly labour on the battlefield and has few compunctions in shooting those trying to flee.

The LTTE has a long history of assassinating all those who disagree with it. Its victims include Rajiv Gandhi, progressive Sri Lankan Tamil intellectuals, and its own dissidents. It is probably the most murderous and pathologically militarised group in South Asia.

Says the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, a group that has a pluralistic vision of Sri Lanka: “An entire generation of youth has been decimated by the war effort on both sides. The LTTE has sacrificed vast numbers of Tamil youth, many of who were forcibly recruited for a war they did not choose.

It adds: “And the government of Sri Lanka has lured thousands of Sinhala youth from economically marginalised villages to fight its so-called ‘patriotic war’, concealing the high casualties that have been suffered by their families.”

The LTTE cynically capitalised on the plight of Sri Lanka’s Tamils after the infamous Colombo pogrom of July 1983, in which 2,000 Tamils were killed by state-sponsored mobs. The world’s bloodiest civil war has since raged in Sri Lanka.

Until recently, the LTTE was a formidable military force, but had a poor political strategy. In 2005, it played a key role in bringing President Mahinda Rajapakse to power by forcing the Tamils to boycott the election, thus strengthening the forces of Sinhala chauvinism.

The SLDF holds that a ceasefire must give high priority to saving the lives of the trapped civilians: ” why the LTTE is good faith commitment to a ceasefire may be suspect, a pause in the exchange of fire… will be useful for saving the trapped civilian population.”

Moreover, the SLDF wants any cessation of hostilities to be be coupled with pressure on the LTTE to permit United Nations agencies to enter LTTE-controlled areas so that they can ascertain the requirements of relief supplies and medical care.

Argues Achin Vanaik, a political science professor at Delhi University: “India bears a special responsibility in respect of Sri Lanka. It looms as a giant neighbour with a large Tamil population, and has a history of intervention in Sri Lanka.”

He adds: “At stake today is the very survival of the Tamils as a political community. India has to play a proactive role here. It must launch a diplomatic campaign to insist that the Colombo government stop attacking civilians, declare a ceasefire under international monitors, create safe corridors, and permit relief delivery.”

The challenge for India is to persuade Colombo to implement the promised devolution and merger of the North and the East within a federal structure, while resisting the temptation to install violent anti-LTTE and pro-government Tamil parties like People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam in power in the North, as it has done in the East.

Says Ahilan Kadirgamar, an SLDF spokesperson: “The Indian government and the international community should call on the government of Sri Lanka to come out with political proposals that go beyond the 13th constitutional Amendment enacted in 1987 (which promises provincial councils), and effect extensive devolution of power and a non- unitary state structure, along with power-sharing at the centre through a bicameral legislature.”

A week after Islamabad admitted that the plot to carry out the Nov. 26-29 attacks on Mumbai was partially planned in Pakistan, and that Pakistani nationals were among the assailants, there are tentative signs that the strained relations between the two neighbours may be thawing.

At least five such signs are now discernible.

First, and most important, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday ruled out a military option against Pakistan and emphasised that New Delhi would only use diplomatic means to get Islamabad to act against the terrorist network involved in the attacks.

Mukherjee strongly defended India’s diplomatic approach towards Pakistan even as he emphasised that India would continue to demand that Pakistan dismantle “the terrorist infrastructure” in the country “in a verifiable and credible manner”.

He said: “Diplomacy has not failed. Diplomacy has prevailed. They (Pakistan) had admitted the involvement of elements from their country behind the terror attacks… We did not mobilise a single soldier, we did not press the panic button, we did not lay mines on the border, but we said we expected Pakistan to fulfil its commitment. They informed us in February admitting the involvement of elements in their country.”

Islamabad’s admission came five weeks after India handed over a detailed dossier on Mumbai to the Pakistan government, containing evidence of the involvement of Lashkar-e-Toiba militants in the Mumbai assault.

Mukherjee was careful to add India ”doesn’t mean to rub [Pakistan] on the wrong side. We know the complexity of our neighbour. Everyone knows that [the] Pakistan situation is complex”.

This is the clearest statement so far from an Indian high official indicating that New Delhi does not intend to use coercive means to secure Pakistan’s cooperation in preventing and punishing terrorist activities carried out from its soil.

“This is undoubtedly a marked departure from the recent rhetoric employed by India accusing Pakistan of denial, evasion and prevarication,” says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor in the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Second, according to Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, “India has expressed a wish that a team from the FIA [Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency] should visit India. We are considering this request.”

India has not officially confirmed this. But if this is true, then New Delhi may be more willing than in the past to accept Pakistan’s offer of a “joint investigation” into the Mumbai attacks, or at least, to explore a cooperative approach.

Third, India has made it clear that it does not intend to suspend communication links and people-to-people contacts with Pakistan.

Last week, Mukherjee said: “I must underline that we have no quarrel with the people of Pakistan. We wish them well and we do not think that they should be held responsible or face the consequences of this situation. We have, therefore, consciously, and after due deliberation, not thought it necessary or fit to curtail people to people contacts, trains and road links.”

Fourth, New Delhi has dispelled fears that it would not appoint a new high commissioner (ambassador) to Pakistan as soon as the term of the present incumbent expires at the end of this month.

Earlier, there were reports that India would delay the appointment of his successor until a new government is in power in New Delhi in May after the coming general election partly as a way of temporarily downgrading diplomatic relations with Islamabad in response to Mumbai.

And finally, India is likely to respond in a cooperative and professional fashion to questions about the Mumbai attacks raised by Pakistan. A week ago, Islamabad had highlighted 30 issues on which it wanted further information and clarifications from India.

“All this suggests a measured, friendly and mature response to Pakistan’s change of stance,” argues Mitra Chenoy.

He adds: “It is a sign of sobriety that India resisted calls for retaliation against Pakistan, and that Mukherjee said that ‘human liberty and values are sacrosanct. We cannot imitate certain other countries and their actions’ which are causing the loss of innocent lives every day. Mukherjee was implicitly referring to the United States’ global ‘war on terror’.

Ironically, however, the U.S. is reported to have played an important role in facilitating intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, which led to Pakistan’s admission of the involvement of its nationals in the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 16 that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a proactive role and “orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing [them] to quietly share highly sensitive evidence.”

“The intelligence,” says the Post, ”went well beyond public revelations and included sophisticated intercepts and an array of physical evidence. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks.”

The Mumbai police had allowed the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to interrogate the sole surviving attacker, Amir Ajmal Kasab. The FBI reportedly shared the information it gathered, with intercepts of conversations between the attackers and their minders, with the Pakistani authorities.

In their briefings, Mumbai police officials have said FBI personnel might be requested to appear as prosecution witnesses against Kasab.

The FBI is known to have contributed to the writing of the Mumbai dossier and probably played a major role in persuading Pakistani investigators to accept its authenticity.

Perhaps even more important was the recent visit to South Asia of U.S. President Barrack Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke.

“Holbrooke is a hard-driving diplomat, who used unconventional means, including bluster, bullying and deception, to reach the Dayton agreement which ended the Balkan war in 1995,” says Karamat Ali, a Pakistani political analyst and social activist.

“It is inconceivable that he did not press the Pakistani leadership to admit that the Mumbai attacks originated on Pakistan’s soil, and to promise to act against the culprits,” Ali said.

“This does not argue that India’s bilateral diplomacy and Pakistan’s domestic politics did not play a major role in pushing Islamabad,” Ali added. ‘’They obviously did. But U.S. pressure was probably an important factor in enabling the civilian leadership of Pakistan to mount pressure on the military and break its resistance to responding positively to India.”

Despite the new signs of a possible thaw, not all is hunky dory between India and Pakistan. New Delhi still expects decisive action not only against the six men that the Pakistan government has arrested, and also against the larger terrorist networks of which they are part.

It is not clear if Islamabad will move quickly to dismantle what India calls “the terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan.

India has expressed serious concern at the just-concluded agreement in Swat between the government of the North West Frontier Province and Islamic militants who have overrun the area, attacked and shut down girls’ schools, and are bent on implementing the Shariah code.

New Delhi believes this will encourage jehadi extremists connected with the Taliban, and poses a serious danger to the entire region.

Whether and to what extent that complicates India-Pakistan relations remains unclear. But if both governments continue to reciprocate positive and friendly gestures, a fruitful dialogue on how to contain and combat terrorism might become possible.

Five weeks after India handed over a dossier to Islamabad containing detailed evidence on the Nov. 26-29 Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistan has finally promised an official response, based on investigations by its Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

Commandos winch down on a Jewish outreach centre seized by terorists in Mumbai. Credit: Deepak Salvi/IPS

However, the Indian government is disappointed at a statement issued on Feb. 9 by the Pakistan cabinet’s Defence Coordination Committee – including the armed services chiefs and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency – which says Pakistan needs more information.

The statement says Pakistan will register a case to bring the attacks’ perpetrators to justice under Pakistani law, but it contends that “without substantial evidence from India, it will be exceedingly difficult to complete the investigation and proceed with the case”. Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram has dismissed Pakistan’s contention as “rubbish”. The Indian External Affairs Ministry has told Pakistan: “We await a formal response. The picture is not clear.”

As New Delhi mulls its future options, a complex scenario is unfolding in the region amidst the visit to Pakistan of United States President Barack Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke.

In attack similar to the ones carried in Mumbai, a group of eight heavily armed fighters stormed three government buildings in Kabul, killing 20 people and inuring 57 others. All the eight attackers were killed, bringing the death toll to 28.

In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, legislator Alam Zeb Khan of the secular Awami National Party was killed and seven others were injured when a remote-controlled bomb exploded close to his vehicle in Peshawar.

Meanwhile, a senior al-Qaeda leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, believed to be the network’s commander in Afghanistan, has warned India that it will pay a “heavy price if it attacks Pakistan. The Mujahideen will sunder your armies into the ground, like they did to the Russians in Afghanistan”.

This is the first time that al-Qaeda has specifically threatened India in such an overt fashion.

The Indian government is coming under pressure from within to explore various options to deal with what it considers to be Pakistan’s strategy of evasion and denial in respect of the Mumbai attacks and the role of jehadi militants in planning and executing them.

The FIA’s report has not been made public. But senior Pakistani officials have been quoted in the media as saying that the authorities have arrested at least five people from Karachi in connection with the attacks, and they will be put on trial with Amir Ajmal Kasab, the sole terrorist caught alive by police in Mumbai.

According to Pakistani media reports, the FIA inquiry report only blames individual suspects for the attacks and does not mention the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jamaat-ud-Dawa as the masterminds. There are suggestions too that the conspiracy to carry out the attacks was hatched in a European country and involved two South Asian states, but not Pakistan.

“This stretches credulity”, argues Karamat Ali, a Karachi-based political analyst and social activist. “Even if the plot was hatched outside Pakistan, some if not all of its executors were Pakistani. Naming Austria or Britain as the conspiracy site only suggests the existence of a supra-national jehadi network, it does not exonerate Pakistan.”

Many past terrorist attacks too had a Pakistan link. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during his December visit to South Asia said that 75 percent of the most serious terror plots being investigated by British authorities have links to Pakistan.

Analysts in the region believe that it is simply inconceivable that a handful of individuals could have conducted the Mumbai attacks without being guided by a highly inspired network with a broad political agenda, including promoting pro-Taliban interests and provoking rivalry between India and Pakistan.

The agenda may also be aimed at widening disaffection in India and promoting the communal divided between India’s Hindu majority and its sizeable Muslim minority.

Evidence collected by Indian police agencies suggests that the attackers were rigorously trained in armed combat, maritime navigation, and the use of sophisticated communications techniques including satellite phones and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).

The evidence provided in the Indian dossier on Mumbai (available at http://www.hindu.com/nic/dossier.htm) is certainly substantial and of exceptionally high quality. This assessment is reportedly corroborated by the U.S.’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which interrogated Kasab, the surviving attacker.

FBI interest in the case stems partly from the fact that among the 180 people who died in the bloody rampage, carried out by a group of ten heavily armed men, were six U.S. citizens.

Apart from Kasab’s confessions, the evidence includes the names and addresses of some of the attackers, and above all, a rich body of circumstantial evidence which, the Indian government says will stand scrutiny in a court of law in any civilised country.

The latter includes GPS records recovered from an Indian fishing trawler hijacked by the attackers; photographs of armaments used and personal effects such as garments, powdered milk cartons and toiletries, with Pakistani markings; and money trails linking Pakistan-based operators to the purchase of a Voice over Internet Protocol platform.

It also includes fingerprints on the rubber dinghies on which the attackers landed in Mumbai; and eight partial transcripts of intercepted conversations between the attackers and their LeT handlers, some of whom have been named – e.g. Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Abu Hamza and Yousuf alias Muzammil.

Says Delhi University-based political scientist Achin Vanaik: “It does not stand to reason that the FIA could not verify this information or investigate yet more leads within five weeks. The most charitable interpretation is that the Pakistan government is consciously practising outright denial. Making endless demands for more information, while ignoring the clinching evidence that has been presented, is fully compatible with this.”

According to Vanaik, a likelier hypothesis is that Pakistan’s civilian government has caved in to pressure from the army and the ISI to shield some key serving or former operatives involved in instigating and training the attackers, if not in planning the conspiracy in order to divert Pakistani troops from the Afghanistan border, where they are battling al-Qaeda-Taliban forces, to the eastern border with India.

In the process, says Karamat Ali, “Pakistan’s civilian government, already weakened by growing rivalry between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, and by steadily rising tensions between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (N), has further eroded its authority and legitimacy. This too will play into the hands of extremist forces.”

How the Obama administration will deal with the unfolding situation remains unclear, although Holbrooke may provide some clues at the end of his visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and later, India.

But it is clear that Pakistan’s stonewalling tactics have strengthened the hands of Indian hardliners, who now advocate covert action in Pakistan, or coercive diplomacy targeting the shared waters of the Indus river system with a view to reducing their flows into Pakistan.

Matters are complicated domestically as India moves towards a general election, probably in April. “This will narrow the options available to the ruling United Progressive Alliance government,” says Vanaik. “One can only hope that sobriety will somehow prevail.”

Exasperated by what it regards as “a continuing pattern of evasiveness and denial in Pakistan’s response to the terrorist attack on Mumbai”, India seems to be fashioning a two-pronged approach towards Islamabad to get it to act firmly against terrorist networks based on its soil.

If one element in this approach is to downgrade relations with Pakistan and remind it that the military option is not entirely off the table, the second element is to cajole Pakistan to proceed legally against jehadi extremist groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (renamed Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and yet again, Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal).

Different officials of the Indian government have recently made varying statements suggesting the existence of such a dual strategy, or ‘the good cop, bad cop’ approach.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has by and large adopted a soft stance, while other officials have spoken as if they preferred a strategy to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan in a calibrated way.

Thus, following the second approach, India’s newly appointed Home Minister P. Chidambaram told ‘The (London) Times’ that India could consider ending people-to-people and trade relations with Islamabad.

Chidambaram said: “There are many, many links between India and Pakistan, and if Pakistan does not cooperate and does not help to bring the perpetrators [of the terrorist attacks] to heel, those ties will become weaker and weaker and one day snap.”

On Thursday, in another instance of this graded approach, India’s army chief Deepak Kapoor told the media that New Delhi is keeping all its options open, but the military option would be “the last resort”. He said: “There is no need for war hysteria” and emphasised that “waging war is a political decision”.

More ominously, Kapoor hinted at the possibility of covert action in Afghanistan and said increasing India’s strategic presence in Afghanistan is “one of the factors” to be considered in exerting pressure on Pakistan. But he made it clear that the decision would be a political one.

Kapoor said: “Changing our strategic policy towards Kabul in terms of raising military stakes is one of the factors that is to be determined politically.”

Just a week earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had accused Pakistan of using “terrorism as an instrument of state policy”.

Yet another indication of this gradual hardening of India’s stance came in the cancellation of a meeting with Pakistan to discuss a maritime border dispute at Sir Creek, a narrow 100 kilometre-long estuary which divides the two countries on the Arabian Sea.

It was from the Sir Creek area that the 10 men who conducted the Mumbai attacks of Nov. 26-29 hijacked a fishing boat to reach their destination.

The Creek has long been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, who disagree on the location of the maritime border, and have debated it since 1999. Officials of the two countries recently conducted a survey of the estuary.

The dispute is considered extremely close to resolution. “We have made considerable progress and hopefully, a solution should emerge in a couple of meetings,” says an Indian official who declined to be identified.

“But the Mumbai attacks and Pakistan’s refusal to take action on the basis of the detailed dossier on Mumbai recently given to it by India have complicated matters,” the official added.

Pressure on New Delhi to adopt a tough stance vis-à-vis Pakistan comes especially from the media, from retired diplomats and military and intelligence officials. This is apart from ultra-nationalist, opposition political parties.

Immediately after the Mumbai attacks, several television channels launched a campaign in favour of punishing Pakistan. This has, however, become less hysterical recent days.

But 10 former ambassadors, last week, urged the government to downgrade diplomatic ties with Pakistan.

In a joint statement, the ambassadors, including four former foreign secretaries, called upon the government to suspend bilateral negotiations and the peace process, discontinue state-assisted cultural, sporting and other exchanges, review existing bilateral treaties and agreements and take specific economic measures against Pakistan.

They also want New Delhi to restrict procurement from countries or companies supplying defence material to Pakistan.

However, their appeal, and their view that that the attacks were carried out “with the knowledge and support of sections of the Pakistan military and the ISI” (Inter-Services Intelligence agency), are at variance with the Foreign Ministry’s position against suspending trade, transport and cultural relations with Pakistan.

A senior Ministry official has said that the demand for terminating diplomatic and people-to-people links would “actually play into the hands of the Pakistani military establishment”, which would like to stoke tensions and generate a state of siege in the neighbouring country.

India’s foreign ministry has reacted in a relatively cool and sober fashion to statements emanating from Pakistan to the effect that the Mumbai dossier contains “information”, but not “evidence”.

In a significant move, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told a television channel on Friday that India would be satisfied if those involved in planning and executing the Mumbai attacks are tried in Pakistani courts, provided they are “tried fairly”.

An identical view was stated two days earlier in New Delhi by visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

This marks a departure from India’s earlier demand that Pakistan must hand over to it some 40 terrorists and fugitives from Indian law. India has made this demand repeatedly since the Parliament House attack of December 2001, allegedly conducted by a Pakistan-based group.

India has not officially withdrawn that demand. “But there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it is not very practical to expect Pakistan to surrender its nationals for trial in India,” says Achin Vanaik, a professor of international relations and global politics at the University of Delhi.

“This recognition is welcome, but Pakistan must do more on its own to crack down on jehadi groups,” Vanaik added.

Many Pakistan-based analysts believe that Islamabad, in particular its weak civilian government, cannot afford to be seen to be caving in to Indian pressure.

For instance, former general Talat Masood has repeatedly said on Indian television channels that there is likely to be a divergence between officials pronouncements and actions, but that he expected some action on the ground.

As if on cue, on Thursday, Pakistan’s prime ministerial advisor on interior affairs, Rehman Malik, announced the detention of 71 members of outlawed militant groups such as the JuD and the LeT and such of their top ranking leaders as Hafiz Mohammed Saeed [founder of both groups], Mufti Abdur Rehman and Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

Malik, in a televised press conference, said five “training camps” of the JuD had been shut down and its websites banned. A special investigation team headed by a top official of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) will now examine “without any prejudice” all aspects of the Mumbai attacks and the information provided by India, he said.

“India’s best bet lies in patient diplomacy at the bilateral and multilateral levels to secure a firm commitment and action from Pakistan to put down jehadi groups,” argues Vanaik.

‘’All talk of covert operations in Afghanistan is a major distraction from this,” Vanaik said. ”It can only stoke suspicion and hostility in Pakistan and strengthen the hardliners, besides creating new intractable rivalries in Afghanistan’s already troubled situation.”

Vanaik believes that it is unwise for India to place too much reliance on the United States, given President-elect Barrack Obama’s intention to intensify the Afghanistan war. This, he said, calls for cooperation from the Pakistan Army and ”limits the amount of pressure the U.S. can mount on Pakistan”.

Another of New Delhi’s priorities has been to persuade Washington to abandon its plans to appoint a special envoy to South Asia, who will help mediate Kashmir as well as other outstanding regional issues. Recent indications suggest that the Indian government has had a measure of success in this.

Meanwhile, civil society groups in both India and Pakistan are stepping up their efforts to maintain people-to-people contacts and ask their governments to abjure the military option and jointly fight religious extremism and terrorism.

A 20-member delegation of Pakistani civil society activists is planning to visit New Delhi between Jan. 21 and 23. It will be hosted by a number of Indian peace groups and activists and will interact with senior political leaders, key policymakers, the academic community and the media.

Six weeks after the Mumbai terrorist attacks precipitated a grave new crisis in their mutual relations, the danger of a military conflict breaking out between India and Pakistan has receded.

The two “distant neighbours” seem to be heading towards less hostile diplomatic exchanges, but are still wary of being seen to be weak and yielding to pressure.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations in both countries have raised their voices in favour of renouncing military options to deal with the crisis, and asked the two governments to “redouble their efforts” to devise an “effective strategy” against terrorism and religious militancy and “quickly compose their differences over ways of dealing with terrorism”.

A significant change has come about since the Indian government presented a detailed dossier to Pakistan’s ambassador in New Delhi on Jan. 6, containing evidence that the attacks were planned and executed by the Pakistan-based extremist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, itself related to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa organisation banned recently by Pakistan following the United Nations Security Council resolution.

A day later, the Pakistan government officially admitted for the first time that the sole surviving assailant, Amir Ajmal Kasab, who has been in the custody of the Mumbai police, is a Pakistani national.

In the process, however, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sacked National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani for confirming Kasab’s identity to the media without his authorisation.

Until now, the Pakistan government had maintained, in the face of media reports identifying Kasab and his father and verifying their address in a village in the Pakistani Punjab, that there was no proof that Kasab is a Pakistani.

“Now that the government has confirmed Kasab’s identity as a Pakistani, it is incumbent upon it to investigate how LeT came to play the role that it did, probe into its various official and sub-state connections and swiftly bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice,” says Karamat Ali, a Karachi-based social activist and a founder-member of the Pakistan Peace Coalition, an umbrella group set up in 1999.

“Indeed, the government must go further and crack down on all jehadi groups with violent and fundamentalist agendas and smash the infrastructure that supports them. These groups have become a menace not just to distant and neighbouring countries, but to Pakistan itself,” Ali said.

‘’It is unfortunate that Durrani was sacked at this particular point of time because of internal differences between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani. But that shouldn’t prevent the government from acting seriously against the terrorist groups,” Ali added.

If Pakistan takes some real action, which goes beyond the token house arrests made after JuD was banned, then India is likely to be persuaded to take a more cooperative approach towards Islamabad and work out the steps through which the two governments could work together against extremist groups.

India and Pakistan set up a Joint Anti-Terrorism Mechanism in March 2007, and this has met a number of times. But no meeting was convened after the attacks in November.

The two countries are also members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which adopted a comprehensive convention against terrorism in 1987, and also fall and followed it up with an additional protocol. This makes it mandatory for the regional governments to share information and investigate and act against terrorist crimes jointly.

SAARC includes India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. The absence of cooperation between India and Pakistan after Mumbai is explained by a lack of mutual trust. India claims to have clinching evidence of LeT’s involvement in the attacks and suspects that the group was backed covertly by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency or by the army.

The evidence collected by India in the dossier includes transcripts of telephone conversations purportedly between the assailants and their handlers in Pakistan during the period Nov. 20 – 29, GPS (global positioning system) and satellite telephone signatures; transcripts of conversations between the attackers and their handlers; photographs of arms with Pakistani markings; use of virtual telephone numbers generated over the Internet; and the associated money trails.

On the other hand, Pakistan has been in denial but only of the role played by LeT and other Pakistan-based groups, but also of its own state’s responsibility for the security of its neighbourhood.

“Mercifully, India and Pakistan have given a break to the sabre-rattling in which they engaged just after the Mumbai attacks,” says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor at the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University here. “This is welcome because any military conflict between the two countries is liable to escalate into a Nuclear Armageddon.”

But, adds Chenoy: “Neither government has so far fashioned a coherent non-military alternative approach to the crisis. Pakistan is yet to move away decisively from denial and stonewalling to cooperation. And India has been giving out contradictory signals.”

Thus, a day after India presented the Mumbai dossier to Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused Pakistan of using “terrorism as an instrument of state policy”. He charged it with “whipping up war hysteria” and blamed its “fragile” government, including the civilian government, for the neighbourhood’s “uncertain security environment”: the “more fragile a government, the more it act[s] in an irresponsible fashion”.

Says political scientist Achin Vanaik: “This runs counter to the logic and rationale of the India-Pakistan peace process launched in 2004. It sits ill with India’s considered view that Pakistan’s civilian government is friendly towards India and keen to act against terrorists, and must be supported.”

Singh cited no evidence to prove the Pakistan government’s involvement in the attacks. His charges were based on a general assessment, surmise or inference, similar to that drawn by Home Minister P Chidambaram – namely, “in a crime of this size and scale, I will presume that it was state-assisted until the contrary is proved. I will draw an adverse inference…”

Adds Vanaik: “Such inference fits past patterns of ‘plausible deniability’ in which the ISI diabolically instigated terrorist violence. It may well apply to Mumbai, although other persuasive hypotheses suggest the ISI may only have given logistical support. However, the assessment must be specifically proved in Mumbai’s case. ‘’

If India’s objective, as Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon put it, is to get Pakistan to further investigate LeT’s role in the operation, then it is counterproductive to accuse Pakistan in ways which embarrass even the civilian government. If the goal is to discredit Pakistan, then it is pointless to share the dossier with it.

However, the Indian government seems to be relying primarily on the United States to exert pressure on Pakistan to act on India’s Mumbai dossier. According to the outgoing U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford, this dossier was prepared with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which is examining the deaths of six U.S. citizens in the Mumbai attack.

“When Americans are killed anywhere, we pursue those people and that is what we are up to in Pakistan. We will press ahead and we will do it non-stop, as long as it takes,” Mulford said, at a luncheon on Friday organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries.

‘’The U.S. has been pressing for deeper understanding in Pakistan of the roots of the problem of terrorism, Mulford said. “Like India, we have a common agenda… we want to see Pakistan succeed, not fail, not become a serious problem, not become a failed state.

The FBI was reportedly allowed to interrogate Kasab over a number of sessions and has corroborated the intercepts by Indian agencies with its own records. The Indian government expects Washington, and in particular the FBI, to mount pressure on Pakistan to act.

“This may not be a wise strategy,” argues Vanaik. “The U.S. has its own agendas in South Asia. Imbalance and myopia are integral to U.S. policy towards the region. And there is a huge risk in greater U.S. involvement here. President-elect Barrack Obama plans to intensify the Afghanistan war. This will increase U.S. dependence on the Pakistan army, and downgrade India’s anti-terrorist concerns.”

What do you call a five-day-long gathering of 50,000 people, which features more than 350 panels, conferences, seminars and workshops on a range of social, political and cultural issues, along with film festivals, musical and dramatic events, and colourful marches by diverse groups dancing for different causes?

Is it a carnival, jamboree or an extravaganza which does not serve much of a purpose except for promoting bonhomie among like-minded people? Or is it an important space for discussion and debate for civil society movements as they struggle to evolve alternatives to corporate-led globalisation and build a strong enough thrust to bring about social and political change in the long-term interests of underprivileged people?

Going by the experience of many participants of the India Social Forum (ISF) held in Delhi Nov. 9-13, the answer would seem to be a mixture of the two.

”There is simply no doubt that participating in the Forum with its festive atmosphere and its staggering variety is an ennobling experience for most activists, despite all its limitations,” says Dunu Roy, director of Hazards Centre, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) which works on livelihood issues of the poor.

The ISF is part of the Word Social Forum process that began in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001. The WSF was conceived as a direct challenge and ideological-political counter to the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the world’s 1,000 biggest corporations, government leaders and business consultants, held annually in Davos, Switzerland.

The WSF grew organically out of struggles in both the global South and North against neo-liberal globalisation and its iniquitous and skewed consequences. It was preceded in 1999 by dramatic protests in Seattle, Washington, against the World Trade Organisation, and fired by new Southern mobilisations. These included the Workers’ Party in Brazil, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, the anti-Narmada dam struggle in India, and the Ogoni people’s movement against oil multinationals in Nigeria.

For its 2004 event, the WSF shifted its venue to Mumbai. India also hosted an Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad in 2003, which proved a huge success, drawing three times the original estimated participation of 10,000. Mumbai attracted 130,000 delegates and featured some 1,400 conferences and seminars.

The ISF in the Indian capital was organised at three levels: issues specific to India, themes shared with neighbouring countries, and international issues.

Among the India-specific conferences and seminars, some issues figured prominently, including India’s experience of jobless growth under the so-called “8 percent miracle”; new forms of labour servitude; dispossession under capitalist accumulation; displacement of vast numbers from city centres, villages and forests; growing failure of the justice delivery system with its pro-rich bias; continuing exploitation of women, the fight against casteism and defence of the rights of the Dalits (former Untouchables) and Adivasis (indigenous people).

The international themes that attracted large numbers of activists were: heightened exploitation of the Global South by multinational capital backed by international financial institutions; WTO vs. fair trade; rising Southern debt; the coercive prying open of Southern economies; increasing loss of democratic control over economic life in both the North and the South; privatisation of water, electricity and forests; global warming and the responsibility of states to reverse it; growing movements for rights and entitlements in healthcare, education and women’s empowerment in the face of stiff opposition from corporates and governments.

“If I were to highlight the big new issues that attracted the most attention and energy, I would make a relatively short list”, says Prafulla Samantara, an Orissa-based activist who works for the Lok Shakti Abhiyan (people’s power campaign). “On top comes the issue of land, or its grabbing by powerful and predatory interests, aided by governments and the courts, to set up Special Economic Zones for export production and to ‘beautify’ city centres and make them hospitable to global capital. Next come labour issues, especially the growing unorganised sector and new methods of struggle.”

”And only slightly less important,” adds Samantara, are “questions like militarisation and nuclearisation of South Asia, the need for global nuclear disarmament, the fight for justice in trade, food security, opposition to privatisation, especially in water and power.”

One distinctive feature of the ISF was the prominence given to climate change and carbon trading, in which India has emerged as an unrivalled Third World leader. Indian companies are trying to make billions by offering projects under the so-called Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. They can sell carbon credits to large Northern corporations, which buy them to evade their own responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The whole business is totally fraudulent,” said Larry Lohmann, author of a new volume, “Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power” in the Development Dialogue journal. Lohmann interacted with a number of grassroots activists at the ISF and said that the forces that are dispossessing the tribals of India today are the same ones which uprooted the small farmers in Europe through “enclosures” 250 years ago.

“Carbon trading evades the central issue of drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to arrest global warming”, holds Lohmann. “It will seriously aggravate the climate crisis while further enriching corporate interests.”

The ISF also further advanced interaction between India’s organised Left parties and civil society that began in 2003. Many Left leaders participated in the Forum and shared their experiences and views. “Their interaction accorded recognition to the importance of relating to several movements which the Left did not start, but which it supports,” says D. Thankappan of the New Trade Union Initiative, based in Mumbai.

“These include the campaign for a rural employment guarantee scheme for 100 days of work for every poor family in one-third of the country, initiatives to organise informal sector workers, and mobilisation against the expulsion and dispossession of poor people from many cities. It is a healthy sign that the Left now relates positively to such movements and to civil society.”

However, many activists are critical of the ISF. “It is too flaky and unstructured,” says Ashok Choudhury of the National Forum of Forest Workers. “So it doesn’t really lead to adequate action-oriented dialogue between activists. Sometimes, it doesn’t make even a clear diagnosis of problems and there is very little attempt to build solidarity groups.”

Many others also say that the Forum is so open a space that anything can fall through it without leading to real coordination on strategy, planning, or action. “Most of the issues that the ISF took up already exist in the space of real activism on the ground,” says Roy. “The ISF didn’t add anything really new to their analysis.”

There are other questions too. Should activists be spending so much time and energy in organising such events at the expense of grassroots work? How do genuine people’s movements and Left-wing groups guard against “NGO-isation”? “There are no clear answers yet,” says Choudhury. “But at least these issues are being raised within a generally constructive approach that sees the (limited) worth of the Social Forum process.”