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India has served Pakistan with a demand to hand over 20 of its most feared criminals and militants, seeking co-operation with its neighbour rather than military confrontation in response to last week’s attacks on Mumbai. Pranab Mukherjee, India’s foreign minister, said yesterday: “We have asked for the arrest and handover of those persons who are settled in Pakistan and who are fugitives of Indian law.“Nobody is talking of military action against Pakistan,” he said of the threat of a rapid deterioration of relations between the two nuclear armed rivals.The comments were made ahead of a visit by Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, to New Delhi today. Western diplomats believe Ms Rice’s meetings with senior Indian government figures will be far from easy.One question that Indian leaders may well raise with Ms Rice is why the US expects India to take a measured and controlled response to the Mumbai attacks, given the US has had a policy for some time of launching direct military strikes against core members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Some western diplomats believe India could argue that it, too, should take similar action against terrorist groups within Pakistan, given the threat they pose to India’s national security.The request to hand over some of India’s most wanted terrorists is the first sign of the intense pressure India is expected to exert on Pakistan, following the Mumbai atrocities, which Indian authorities blame on Pakistani militants. The suspects possibly have links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group that has fought against Indian control of Kashmir.India was waiting for a reaction from Pakistan that showed it genuinely wanted a shift for the better in relations with India in the wake of the attacks, a government spokesman said yesterday.But few consider New Delhi’s demands realistic since the militants are on the run and possibly not even in Pakistan.The list includes Dawood Ibrahim, a formidable underworld don held responsible for the 1993 bomb attack on Mumbai; Masood Azhar, leader of a group suspected of attacking the Indian parliament in 2001; and Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, a university professor who founded Lashkar-e-Taiba.Pakistan said it wanted to form a joint commission with India to investigate the Mumbai attacks, chaired by the two countries’ National Security Advisers.But Pakistani officials and analysts doubted any extraditions of their nationals would be possible unless Pakistan also received some of the people it has asked Delhi to hand over. In the past, Pakistan’s government has said it would consider extraditing Indian nationals suspected of criminal activity, but never Pakistanis.“We also have our own list of people and the Indians know that,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi,a respected Pakistani scholar on security and political affairs. “Unfortunately, India is going over ground we have covered before. Right now, what we need is something entirely new rather than the path we have already trodden in south Asia which is that of just pointing fingers on the other side.”The wave of terror that has killed more than 400 people this year continued yesterday. A bomb exploded on a passenger train in Assam in India’s north-east, killing two people and injuring 20. At the end of October, a multiple bomb attack in Assam claimed about 60 lives.Additional reporting by James Blitz
By James Lamont in New Delhi and Farhan Bokhari in London
As in the days of Noah....
