Mumbai struck again

Terrorists have once again struck Mumbai, India's commercial hub, with deadly ferocity killing a score of people and injuring five times that number. All three nearly-simultaneous blasts, which were apparently triggered by time-devices, took place in the busy sections of the sprawling metropolis during the evening rush hours.
The Zaveri Bazar, where the first blast took place and took the heaviest toll of life, has been struck earlier also on two previous occasions - once in 1993 and then in 2003. The local police are said to have no intelligence if the city was in imminent danger of a terror attack. Nor is there, so far, any claim of responsibility for the attack, unlike the usual practice we are familiar with in Pakistan.
Though in the earliest hour of the incident, Mumbai police suspected the Indian Mujahideen while Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan looked beyond India's national borders for this attack on "India's sovereignty", but soon enough calm prevailed as Home Minister P Chidambaram remarked that this could be the handiwork of any of the "groups hostile to India". Presently, like other South Asian countries, India too is confronted with the challenge of home-grown insurgencies in a number of its states, in addition to myriad extremist outfits who often resort to acts of violence and sabotage. That Indian government has shown restraint in raising its accusatory finger in any particular direction is indeed a proof of its maturity.
Pakistan is among the countries that have promptly condemned the latest Mumbai carnage. According to a statement issued by the Foreign Office, "President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, the government and the people of Pakistan have condemned the blasts in Mumbai and expressed distress on the lives and injuries". The President and the Prime Minister also expressed their deepest sympathies to the Indian leadership on the loss of lives, injuries and damage to property in Mumbai, the statement added. Not that Islamabad wouldn't have condemned the attack and conveyed its condolences to Indian leadership and people; it's the timing of the carnage that seems to have triggered the promptness of its action.
As the Mumbai blasts have occurred shortly ahead of the scheduled meeting of their foreign ministers - a much wanted development which tends to break the ice that has beset the bilateral relationship since the 2008 Mumbai attack - Pakistan would like to ensure that the nascent process of peace and normalisation is not derailed. It is no secret that forces hostile to normalisation of relations between these two neighbours are out to sabotage the process; a case in point is the reported threats to Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir and Pakistan High Commissioner in New Delhi Shahid Malik against engaging with New Delhi. While the Pakistan government is conscious of this, the Indian government too needs to be cautious against being hijacked by the anti-Pakistan lobbies.
Pakistan and India do have quite conflicting positions on a number of issues, some left by the history and others born out of the gapping void of their leaders' political will to face ground realities and hard truth. Now that there are some early signs of bilateral relationship recovering from the spell of hiatus and morbidity imposed by the 2008 Mumbai attacks the forces, domestic and international, hostile to resumption of peace dialogue are out to sabotage the said process.
There is the danger that New Delhi may once again play into their hands as it did before by trying to make a case against Pakistan for the alleged support to terrorists. That would be jumping the gun, as India did only recently by handing over to Pakistan the list of most wanted terrorists some of which were later found out to be in India. No doubt the Mumbai carnage has come at a difficult time for the Indian government and there would be no dearth of people in India, including some from its military leadership, who would bay for the Pakistani blood, testing patience of the Indian political leadership. We hope and expect that though faced with even more dangerous terrorist threat Pakistan would be all out to offer its co-operation in identifying and hunting down the alleged criminals. We also hope that instead of shooting from the hip the Indian government would show patience and not hurl blame on Pakistan just to cover up its own failing in effectively tackling the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism.