NYT : India Presses Pakistan on Terrorism but Finds Its Own Options Limited

India Presses Pakistan on Terrorism but Finds Its Own Options Limited

By SOMINI SENGUPTA | December 11, 2008

NEW DELHI — Even as Indian officials on Thursday lambasted Pakistan as the “epicenter” of terrorism and dismissed its crackdown on extremist groups as inadequate in the wake of last month’s attacks in Mumbai, they all but ruled out the prospect of a military confrontation.

Rather, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told members of Parliament that it would take time for India to turn off the tap of support for militant groups operating across the border, and that war was “no solution.”

“We shall have to patiently confront it,” he said. “We have no intention to be provoked.”

His words signaled India’s delicate and somewhat circumscribed options. If it were to carry out even limited military strikes against Pakistan, it would be likely to lose the support of its allies, namely the United States, which fears that Pakistan would then divert troops from its western border with Afghanistan to its eastern one with India.

Second, India confronts a weak civilian government in Pakistan, which, as Indian officials have long acknowledged privately, has little muscle to counter the powerful military and spy agency.

India’s options include suspending peace talks and what military analysts call limited punitive strikes on terrorist training camps.

Mr. Mukherjee said Thursday that he had no “quarrel” with the administration of President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan but pressed him to do more to dismantle support for militants. Initially after the Mumbai attacks, Mr. Zardari had described the suspects as “nonstate actors” over whom the Pakistani government had no control. On Thursday, that statement met with a stinging retort from Mr. Mukherjee.

“Are they nonstate actors coming from heaven, or are they coming from a different planet?” Mr. Mukherjee asked. “Nonstate actors are operating from a particular country. What we are most respectfully submitting, suggesting to the government of Pakistan: Please act. Mere expression of intention is not adequate.”

India’s coalition government, led by the Congress Party, is keenly aware of a wave of public outrage over the administration’s failure to heed intelligence warnings or stop the attackers more quickly. On Thursday, it unveiled an overhaul of the national security system. The government said it would set up a national investigative agency to coordinate with various state and local law enforcement agencies, increase coastal security and modernize the police forces.

“Given the nature of the threat, we can’t go back to business as usual,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a speech to Parliament. He said it would require “hard decisions to prepare the country and people to face the challenge of terrorism.”

The gunmen who carried out the three-day siege of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, killed 171 people. Nine of the gunmen were killed and a 10th was arrested. The Mumbai police said all of the attackers were Pakistani citizens who traveled across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai, formerly Bombay. They are believed to have belonged to a Pakistan-based group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is officially banned in Pakistan.

This week, in response to appeals by India and the United States, the United Nations Security Council declared that a charity called Jamaat-ud-Dawa was a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba and subject to United Nations sanctions, including the freezing of its assets and a travel ban on four of its leaders. Those leaders include Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the head of the charity, and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who India said had planned the Mumbai attacks and whose arrest the Pakistani government announced last Sunday.

Indian officials dismissed the arrests as inadequate. They pointed out that Pakistan had placed many of the same men under house arrest after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, which India said was the work of Pakistan-based groups, but quietly released them later.

“We have noted the reported steps taken by Pakistan, but clearly much more needs to be done,” India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, told Parliament on Thursday evening. He called for the dismantling of “the infrastructure of terrorism” across the border and then issued a warning to India’s allies abroad. “The political will of the international community,” he said, “must be translated into concrete and sustained action on the ground.”

India’s wait-and-watch approach seems to be primarily directed at the United States, political analysts here say, and particularly at President-elect Barack Obama, who India hopes will exert a stronger hand against Pakistan. “India will have to wait until the logic of this is going to work out and the United States will have to act,” said K. Subrahmanyam, a strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. “What we are waiting for is when Obama takes over, there will be a showdown between Pakistan and the United States, unless Pakistan is prepared to mend its ways.”

The United States has sought to temper India’s reaction and has pushed Pakistan to do more. The deputy secretary of state, John D. Negroponte, was in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, on Thursday, a week after visits by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“There is a lot of pressure to do something meaningful and see Pakistan take long-term irreversible steps, but the Indian government has up to this point been very cautious,” said Xenia Dormandy, a former Bush administration official who now runs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

If Pakistan does not go further, she added, India would be likely to act with a heavier hand. “Whether it is as forward leaning as bombing camps in Jammu and Kashmir, I don’t know,” she said. “I think you will see India take some stronger steps in the next two, three weeks.”

Adding to the difficulty of dealing with Pakistan, Indian and foreign analysts point out, is that the civilian government itself confronts a powerful army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the spy agency. Indeed, immediately after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan’s civilian administration announced that it would send its spy chief to India; within hours, that offer was withdrawn.

“Who do you deal with, who do you talk to?” a Western diplomat in India said. “If you get the government to do something about it and if the real organization is the ISI — and I say if — then any action by the government is going to be of limited use, really. It is a problem. It is one everybody is thinking about.”

Business Week : Why Delhi Bombings Target Business

Why Delhi Bombings Target Business

In strikes against busy markets and upscale shops, the shadowy Indian Mujahideen is going for "maximum chaos" and "maximum financial damage," police say

by Mehul Srivastava | September 14, 2008

New Delhi—A day after five controlled explosions ripped through busy markets and a commercial district in India's capital, killing at least 23 people, Indian officials were engaged in a frenzied hunt for clues that, so far, has been fruitless.

But even as police detained as many as 18 suspects and questioned their one credible witness, a 12-year-old balloon seller, it became clear that in choosing their targets, the perpetrators repeated a now-familiar pattern. Instead of attacking the familiar symbols of the Indian state, they mostly selected locations that symbolized India's newfound affluence and economic might.

In Connaught Place, the geographic center of the city, two bombs exploded near the entrance to the largest station in the city's metro system, built recently at huge expense and to be completed to coincide with the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Nearby, another bomb exploded on a main road surrounded by the tall buildings and cramped offices that have mushroomed during India's growth. At an up-market shopping area in posh southern Delhi, a smaller blast blew out the windows of Reebok, Levi Strauss, and Swarovski shops, according to an Agence France-Presse reporter who was at the scene. And in Karol Bagh, in the northwest quadrant of this hectic and disorganized city, the bombs blew up in an area best described as a global bazaar—featuring cell phones smuggled in from China, blue jeans from America, computer chips from Taiwan, and furniture from Malaysia.
More Bombs Defused

"It's the same thing again and again," says a senior official with Indian Police Service, who had briefed the Indian Cabinet on the bombings on Saturday. "This group [Indian Mujahideen] doesn't attack Parliament or police stations. They go directly for maximum chaos and maximum financial damage."

The Indian Mujahideen remains a shadowy organization about which not much is known. But in Jaipur, a popular tourist spot west of Delhi, and in Ahmedabad, a prosperous city in one of India's most rapidly industrializing states, the organization claimed responsibility for bombing similar locations—killing at least 108 and wounding many hundreds more, all in the past year. A third series of similar attacks in Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital, in which eight small bombs exploded, killing one person, is suspected to have been masterminded by the same group.

The group, which e-mailed a warning to several media outlets five minutes before the blast, is relatively new, according to an official with the National Security Guards, which on Friday defused three other bombs, including one near a famous movie theater a few hundred meters from an initial blast. "We've seen the same kind of bombs before," he said, asking not to be quoted by name because NSG officials are forbidden to speak with the media. "You can learn how to make these in two days from the Internet. The difficult part is the coordination, which indicates that at least 15 or 20 people could have been involved in the final stages of the operation."
Ties to Pakistani Militants?

In the e-mail, published Sunday by the Hindustan Times and some TV channels, the group included an infamous photograph of a Muslim man in Gujarat pleading with an anti-Muslim Hindu mob as it burned and rioted its way through Ahmedabad in 2002. "Eye for an eye," said the e-mail. "The dust will never settle down."

In the past decade, India has been among the top three countries in the world affected by terrorism, as measured by casualties, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, which tracks media reports on the subject. Just over 1,600 people have been killed since January 2007, according to the portal.

But experts draw a sharp line between those targeted by left-wing extremists, known as Naxalites, who openly attack industrial projects (BusinessWeek, 5/7/08) and Islamic militants like the Indian Mujahideen, who are suspected of having ties to Pakistani militant groups. "Their aim is the same—create havoc, kill innocent people, cause economic damage—but their motivations are so far apart that it's doubtful that they even speak to each other," said an official with the Intelligence Bureau, who asked not to be named because the bomb blasts were a politically sensitive matter.
Malls Frisk Shoppers

In major metro areas in India, large businesses are mindful of the fact that they might one day become a target. Visitors to movie halls and modern, American-style malls are frisked by uniformed security guards almost as efficiently as at India's airports. Large corporations are asked by police officials to prepare emergency evacuation plans in the case of a bombing. "We worry about being considered a target," says an official at Infosys Technologies (INFY.O), India's outsourcing giant. "Of course we worry. We are large, visible, and everybody knows our name. But you take precautions."

Delhi police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat says there was no intelligence indicating why financial and commercial locations had been chosen for the attacks, saying the investigation was focused simply on cracking the case. But outside Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where most of the victims were brought, an official with the Home Affairs Ministry, which handles internal security, says the reasons were apparent. "Terrorists pick the most visible targets of a nation's strengths. India is an economic power, and that makes its enemies jealous," he says, asking not to be identified because the issue is expected soon to be addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Inside the hospital, where blood streaked across the floor to a room full of injured victims, the question of motive was immaterial. Bheem Kumar, a rickshaw puller who says he was thrown several feet by the impact of blast, sat holding his bandaged head and arm, waiting for his family to find him: "How do I earn without my rickshaw? What do I eat?"

Srivastava reports for BusinessWeek from New Delhi.

NYT : Thousands Homeless After Hindu-Christian Violence in India

Thousands Homeless After Hindu-Christian Violence in India

By SOMINI SENGUPTA | August 28, 2008

NEW DELHI — At least 3,000 people, most of them Christians, are living in government-run relief camps after days of Christian-versus-Hindu violence in the Kandhamal district of Orissa State in eastern India, government officials said.

The government said that in addition large numbers of people were living in the open jungle, without any shelter and security, because of the tensions that erupted in violence after a Hindu leader was killed on Saturday and at least 10 Christians were killed in retaliation.

Christian community leaders said that at least 1,000 Christian homes had been set on fire since Monday and more than 5,000 people were homeless.

Many of them are living in the jungle without food, water and shelter, said Father Dibakar Parichha, a priest at the Catholic church in the town of Phulbani. He also said that about 90 places of worship, including small churches and prayer halls, were burned down. District officials said the figure was about 20.

The Kandhamal district has a history of communal and ethnic clashes going back for more than 20 years. The latest violence started on Saturday night when the Hindu leader, Laxmanananda Saraswati, was killed along with four of his followers by unidentified armed men who stormed a Hindu school in Kandhamal.

The police suspected that Maoist rebels, active in the area, were responsible. But Hindus put the blame for the killings on Christians. In the retaliatory violence, at least 10 people, most of them Christians, have been killed and 500 houses burned. All nine towns in the district are under curfew with shoot-at-sight orders.

At least two people have died in the retaliatory violence in other districts of Orissa, including a woman who died when an orphanage was burned down.

“We are supposed to take drastic action against whosoever indulges in violence” said R.P. Koche, the district chief of police. The local police force has been reinforced by 2,500 paramilitary troops, he said. The district magistrate, Dr. Krishna Kumar, said the situation was tense but under control and more then 200 people had been arrested.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

NYT : Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal

Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal

By SOMINI SENGUPTA | July 7, 2008

BHOPAL, India — Hundreds of tons of waste still languish inside a tin-roofed warehouse in a corner of the old grounds of the Union Carbide pesticide factory here, nearly a quarter-century after a poison gas leak killed thousands and turned this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster.

The toxic remains have yet to be carted away. No one has examined to what extent, over more than two decades, they have seeped into the soil and water, except in desultory checks by a state environmental agency, which turned up pesticide residues in the neighborhood wells far exceeding permissible levels.

Nor has anyone bothered to address the concerns of those who have drunk that water and tended kitchen gardens on this soil and who now present a wide range of ailments, including cleft palates and mental retardation, among their children as evidence of a second generation of Bhopal victims, though it is impossible to say with any certainty what is the source of the afflictions.

Why it has taken so long to deal with the disaster is an epic tale of the ineffectiveness and seeming apathy of India’s bureaucracy and of the government’s failure to make the factory owners do anything about the mess they left. But the question of who will pay for the cleanup of the 11-acre site has assumed new urgency in a country that today is increasingly keen to attract foreign investment.

It was here that on Dec. 3, 1984, a tank inside the factory released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas, killing those who inhaled it while they slept. At the time, it was called the world’s worst industrial accident. At least 3,000 people were killed immediately. Thousands more may have died later from the aftereffects, though the exact death toll remains unclear.

More than 500,000 people were declared to be affected by the gas and awarded compensation, an average of $550. Some victims say they have yet to receive any money. Efforts to extradite Warren M. Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide at the time, from the United States continue, though apparently with little energy behind them.

Advocates for those who live near the site continue to hound the company and their government. They chain themselves to the prime minister’s residence one day and dog shareholder meetings on another, refusing to let Bhopal become the tragedy that India forgot. They insist that Dow Chemical Company, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, also bought its liabilities and should pay for the cleanup.

“Had the toxic waste been cleaned up, the contaminated groundwater would not have happened,” says Mira Shiva, a doctor who heads the Voluntary Health Association, one of many groups pressing for Dow to take responsibility for the cleanup. “Dow was the first crime. The second crime was government negligence.”

Dow, based in Michigan, says it bears no responsibility to clean up a mess it did not make. “As there was never any ownership, there is no responsibility and no liability — for the Bhopal tragedy or its aftermath,” Scot Wheeler, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Wheeler pointed out that the former factory property, along with the waste it contained, had been turned over to the Madhya Pradesh State government in June 1998, and that “for whatever reason most of us do not know or fully understand, the site remains unremediated.”

He went on to say that Dow could not finance remediation efforts, even if it wanted to, because it could potentially open up the company to further liabilities.

In a letter to the Indian ambassador to the United States in 2006, the Dow chairman, Andrew N. Liveris, sought assurance from the government that it would not be held liable for the mess on the old factory site, “in your efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

The claims have divided the government itself. It is now in the throes of a debate over who will pay — a debate that might have taken place behind closed doors were it not for a series of public information requests by advocates for Bhopal residents that turned up revealing government correspondence.

It showed that one arm of the government, the Chemicals and Petrochemicals Ministry, entrusted with the cleanup of the site, has wanted Dow to put down a $25 million deposit toward the cost of remediation, while other senior officials warned that forcing Dow’s hand could endanger future investments in the country.

A senior government official, prohibited from speaking publicly on such a contentious issue, described the quandary. “Do you want $1 billion in investment, or do you want this sticky situation to continue?” the official said, calling it a stalemate.

The government is expected to make a final decision later this year.

Beyond who will pay for the cleanup here, the question is why 425 tons of hazardous waste — some local advocates allege there is a great deal more, buried in the factory grounds — remain here 24 years after the leak?

There are many answers. The company was allowed to dump the land on the government before it was cleaned up. Lawsuits by advocacy groups are still winding their way through the courts. And a network of often lethargic, seemingly apathetic government agencies do not always coordinate with one another.

The result is a wasteland in the city’s heart. The old factory grounds, frozen in time, are an overgrown 11-acre forest of corroded tanks and pipes buzzing with cicadas, where cattle graze and women forage for twigs to cook their evening meal.

Since the disaster, ill-considered decisions on the part of local residents have only compounded the problems and heightened their health risks. Just beyond the factory wall is a blue-black open pit. Once the repository of chemical sludge from the pesticide plant, it is now a pond where slum children and dogs dive on hot afternoons. Its banks are an open toilet. In the rainy season, it overflows through the slum’s muddy alleys.

The slum rose up shortly after the gas leak. Poor people flocked here, seeking cheap land, and put up homes right up to the edge of the sludge pond. Once, the pond was sealed with concrete and plastic. But in the searing heat, the concrete cover eventually collapsed.

The first tests of groundwater began, inexplicably, 12 years after the gas leak. The state pollution control board turned up traces of pesticides, including endosulfan, lindane, trichlorobenzene and DDT. Soil sediments were not tested. The water was never compared with water in other city neighborhoods. The pollution board saw no cause for alarm.

Nevertheless, in 2004, complaints from residents led the Supreme Court to order the state to supply clean drinking water to the people living around the factory. By then, nearly 20 years had gone by.

“It is a scandal that the hazardous wastes left behind by Union Carbide unattended for 20 years have now migrated below ground and contaminated the groundwater below the factory and in its neighborhood,” wrote Claude Alvares, a monitor for India’s Supreme Court, who visited here in March 2005.

He tasted the water from one well. “I had to spit out everything,” he wrote in his report. The water “had an appalling chemical taste.” Neighborhood women brought out their utensils to show how the water had corroded them.

As his report went on to point out, the government was long ago made aware of the likelihood of contamination. A government research center warned more than 10 years ago that, if left untreated, the toxic residue on the factory grounds would seep into the soil and water.

Around the same time, under public pressure, state authorities finally scooped up the toxic waste that had lain in clumps around the factory grounds, and stored it inside the tin-roofed warehouse. The warehouse was padlocked only about four years ago.

The waste was supposed to be taken to an incinerator in neighboring Gujarat, but the government has yet to find a contractor willing to pack it into small, transportable parcels. There have been delays in acquiring transport permits, too, with citizens groups raising new questions about the hazards of transporting the waste.

Ajay Vishoni, the state gas and health minister, said he was confident that none of the waste was hazardous anymore, nor had anyone proved to his satisfaction that it had ever caused the contamination of the groundwater. “There is hype,” he said.

In 2005, a state-financed study called for long-term epidemiological studies to determine the impact of contaminated drinking water, concluding that while the levels of toxic contaminants were not very high, water and soil contamination had caused an increase in respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments.

In the Shiv Nagar slum about half a mile from the factory, there is a boy, Akash, who was born with an empty socket for a left eye. Now 6, he cannot see properly or speak. He is a cheerful child who plays in the lanes near his house.

His father, Shobha Ram, a maker of sweets who bought land here many years after the gas leak and built himself a two-room house, said the boy’s afflictions were caused by the hand-pumped well from where his family drew water on the edge of the sludge pond for years. He said it had not occurred to him that the water could be laced with pesticides.

“We knew the gas incident took place,” he said. “We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house.”

The stories repeat themselves in the nearby slums. In Blue Moon, Muskan, a 2-year-old girl, cannot walk, speak or understand what is happening around her. Her father, Anwar, blames the water.

In Arif Nagar, Nawab and Hassan Mian, brothers who are 8 and 12, move through their house like newly hatched birds, barely able to stand. They have no control over their muscles. Their mother, Fareeda Bi, is unsure of exactly what caused their ailment, but she, too, blames the water.

“There are more children like this in the neighborhood,” she said, “who cannot walk, who cannot see.”

To compound the tragedy, there is no way to know to what extent the water is to blame. The government suspended long-term public health studies many years ago.

Times of India : India protests Pak leader's jehad call for Kashmir's 'freedom'

India protests Pak leader's jehad call for Kashmir's 'freedom'

September 6, 2007

NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday informed Parliament that India had protested against the unwarranted remarks of Pakistani Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, Major (retd) Sayed Tanvir Hussain, advocating jehad for the "freedom" of Kashmir.

In response to a question in the Lok Sabha, Mukherjee said the government was aware of Hussain's remarks in the National Assembly of Pakistan, and the ''Indian High Commission in Islamabad has protested to Pakistan at this gratuitous attack on India.''

Participating in a debate on Pakistan's foreign policy in the National Assembly last month, Hussain had said Pakistan could ''liberate'' Kashmir with jehad in six months. He exhorted the government to open the way to Kashmir for jehadi organisations.

Hussain — who incidentally is singer Mallika Pukhraj's son — had also called for a jehad against the US for undermining Pakistani interests and working with India to create an ''independent'' Kashmir.

While the US had immediately reacted to Hussain's remarks with its Islamabad embassy spokeswoman Elizabeth Colton calling it ''outrageous and reprehensible,'' there was no such immediate reaction from India.

Hussain — who had said that Quranic concepts should be allowed to guide foreign policy in the case of Kashmir — found support from the members of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. Hussain had said that talks were never going to settle the issue as he saw an US-India conspiracy to make the region autonomous.

IHT : 19 bombs found after fatal blasts in India

19 bombs found after fatal blasts in India

International Herald Tribune, Reuters, The Associated Press | August 26, 2007

HYDERABAD, India: The police continued to find and defuse bombs throughout the southern Indian city of Hyderabad on Sunday, a day after a pair of synchronized explosions ripped through two popular gathering spots, killing at least 42 people and wounding scores of others.

State and national officials are calling the blasts in Hyderabad, a city with a history of Muslim-Hindu tensions, acts of terrorism.

After the attacks, the police defused 19 more bombs - all fitted with timers and placed in plastic bags - at bus stops, movie theaters, road intersections and pedestrian bridges. The police said each of the bombs contained ball bearings and ammonium.

India's home minister, Shivraj Patil, said the country was virtually helpless in the face of terror attacks. "We have to take timely action on the basis of information received. But our country is so big that even if we have the information that something is planned we do not know where or when," he said.

The explosions just minutes apart. The first hit an open-air auditorium in a public park during a laser show about the history of Hyderabad, killing at least 11 people. There were unconfirmed reports of two explosions at the park.

The second blast ripped through a popular restaurant, Gokul Chaat, the heart of Hyderabad's commercial district. The police and witnesses say the restaurant was packed with patrons. At least 30 were killed.

By Sunday morning, the death toll had risen to 42 as victims died of wounds suffered in the attacks, said K. Jana Reddy, the state home minister.

Both attacks appeared calculated to cause maximum carnage.

"The metal pellets in the bombs had worked as deadly missiles, killing more people," said Dr. K. Shastry, a senior doctor at a large hospital, which received many dead and wounded.

On Sunday, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the capital, pointed to Islamist militant groups in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

"Available information points to the involvement of terrorist organizations based in Bangladesh and Pakistan," the minister, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, said Sunday after an emergency state cabinet meeting. Reddy said three children were among those killed in the attacks.

The Press Trust of India news agency reported Sunday that intelligence agencies were investigating a possible link to a Bangladesh-based militant group, Harkatul Jihad Al-Islami.

Harkatul, which is banned in Bangladesh, wants to establish strict Islamic rule in the Muslim-majority nation governed by secular laws. The Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry said it had not been informed of the allegations.

Indian officials have blamed militant groups based in Pakistan or Bangladesh for several attacks, saying Islamabad and Dhaka were not doing enough to crack down on anti-India groups.

A national Home Ministry official said Sunday that about 22 people were being questioned in connection with the weekend attack. The police reported that one man had been arrested near Hyderabad on suspicion of selling bicycle ball bearings that were used as pellets in the bombs.

NYT : India Blames Islamic Militants for Blasts

India Blames Islamic Militants for Blasts

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | August 27, 2007

HYDERABAD, India, Aug. 26 (AP) — Indian officials said Sunday that Islamic militants based in Pakistan and Bangladesh were responsible for twin bombings that killed at least 42 people in Hyderabad on Saturday.

Officials said extremists wanted to foment tension between India’s Hindu majority and its Muslim minority, though they provided little evidence linking Islamic militants to the blasts in Hyderabad. Many Muslims here say Hindu extremists are behind the attacks.

“Available information points to the involvement of terrorist organizations based in Bangladesh and Pakistan,” Y. S. R. Reddy, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh State, of which Hyderabad is the capital, told reporters after an emergency state cabinet meeting on Sunday.

Mr. Reddy did not identify the groups or provide proof, saying “it is not possible to divulge all this information.”

A top government official said India was struggling to stop terrorist attacks. “Our country is so big that even if we have the information that something is planned, we do not know where or when,” said Shivraj Patil, India’s home minister.

He did not say if the authorities had advance warning of the blasts, which went off nearly simultaneously at an outdoor auditorium in a park and at a popular restaurant. They were the latest in a series of deadly bombings in India in the past two years that have killed hundreds in India’s capital, New Delhi, its financial center, Mumbai, and other cities.

Indian news media reports, quoting unidentified security officials, said the group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, based in Bangladesh, was behind the attacks. The group, which wants to establish Islamic rule in Bangladesh, has been known to attack non-Bangladeshi targets, including Western diplomats.

Bangladesh condemned the bombings and rejected the allegation that Bangladeshi groups were involved.

Pakistan also reacted angrily to Mr. Reddy’s comments, characterizing them as an “irresponsible” reaction.

“They have been making these allegations, and nothing ever came out of those allegations — and yet they continue maligning Pakistan,” said Tasnim Aslam, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

“Only the Indians have this kind of some supernatural powers that as soon as some terrorist act takes place they know how it happened and who is responsible,” she said.

Indian officials have said other bombings over the past two years have been conducted by Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure, a militant Islamic group based in Pakistan that has fought Indian forces in Indian-administered Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim area.

More than 80 percent of India’s 1.1 billion people are Hindu and 13 percent are Muslim. In Hyderabad, Muslims make up 40 percent of the population. In May, at least 13 people were killed in a bombing at a 17th-century mosque here and the subsequent clashes between worshipers and security forces.

CNN : Monsoon floods displace 19 million

Monsoon floods displace 19 million

CNN | August 4, 2007

LUCKNOW, India (AP) -- Havoc from monsoon rains killed another 12 people in India, including two children swept away by floods and a man attacked by a rhinoceros forced out of its inundated habitat, officials said Saturday.

Helicopters dropped food to hundreds of thousands of frightened villagers perched on rooftops.

Vital to farmers, the annual rains are a blessing and a curse for the subcontinent. At least 198 people have been killed in India and neighboring Bangladesh and 19 million driven from their homes in recent days, according to government figures.

The South Asian monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent. It's always dangerous -- last year more than 1,000 people died, most from drowning, landslides or house collapses.

This year, estimates of total deaths vary wildly from a few hundred to well over 1,000.

Two villagers were killed in a house collapse and two children were swept away by flood waters in several districts of India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. Another person died from a snake bite on a flooded road, said Surender Shrivastav, a state official.

Helicopters dropped food to nearly 2 million people in 2,200 villages cut off by flood waters in the worst-hit eastern parts of Uttar Pradesh, said Umesh Sinha, the state relief commissioner, adding that nearly 279,223 acres of paddy rice crops have been destroyed in the region.

On Friday, six people drowned in northeastern Assam state. One-horned rhinos straying from the state's Kaziranga National Park killed one person and injured two others, said state Revenue Minister Bhumidhar Barman.

Jehir Ali, 28, was riding a bicycle near the village of Gendheli when a rhino charged at him, said Dhiren Gogoi, a wildlife official.

"Ali fell down and was badly mauled by the adult rhino. He was shifted to a hospital where he died," Gogoi told The Associated Press.

Seventy percent of Kaziranga Park has been flooded by the Brahmaputra River, forcing out several rhinos.

"Two rhinos have entered villages in the area resulting in panic among the population," Diganta Barbaruah, another wildlife official, said.

With hundreds of villages submerged across the fertile plains that stretch along the southern edge of the Himalayas, people were taking refuge wherever they could.

Women and children were spotted screaming for help from treetops in Uttar Pradesh. In parts of the state, river levels rose so quickly that villagers had no time to save any belongings.

"The gush of water was so sudden we did not get the time to react," Vinod Kumar, a resident of a flooded village in Basti district, told Enadu TV.

One woman in Uttar Pradesh who identified herself only as Savitra said she had not "eaten anything for the last two days."

Health workers were fanning out across parts of Bangladesh and India to try to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid and cholera.

In northwestern Bangladesh, farmer Rahmat Sheikh and his family were among 2,000 people who fled their flooded village for higher ground in the Sirajganj district.

"The floods have taken away all I had," said the 40-year-old Sheikh. "Rice paddies in the field, two cows and my house all are gone. I don't know how we will now survive."

Some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh have been displaced or marooned by flooding, according to government figures. At least 144 people have died in India and 54 more in Bangladesh.

India's Meteorological Department said unusual monsoon patterns this year have led to heavier than normal rains.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

NYT : South Asia Grapples With Results of Flooding

South Asia Grapples With Results of Flooding

By JULFIKAR ALI MANIK and SOMINI SENGUPTA | August 5, 2007

DHAKA, Bangladesh, Aug. 4 — Nothing tests the mettle of government in this part of the world than a fierce monsoon, as unusually heavy rains across South Asia showed this week, leaving a trail of death and ruin and raising the risk of disease.

Freak rains, which scientists describe as a hallmark of climate change, seemed to be responsible. The devastation was all the more severe because flimsy dams and embankments collapsed under the weight of floodwaters. The mud houses of the poor were the first to wash away.

Weather scientists have said South Asia is likely to get much more unpredictable rain in the coming decades, bringing greater challenges for its governments to prepare and cope with nature’s fury.

In Bangladesh, perennially inundated because so much of it is low-lying delta, more than half of the districts were under water. More than one million families were affected by flooding, according to government officials; the death toll after a week’s heavy rains stood at 58.

According to the country’s meteorological department, Bangladesh received just under 29 inches of rain in July, about double the average. Bangladesh also felt the brunt of greater rain upstream in northern and northeastern India, as swollen rivers broke through their banks on their way down to the Bay of Bengal, said Saiful Hossain, executive engineer of the Flood Forecasting and Warning Center, a government agency.

The flooding has presented the country’s army-backed caretaker government, which took power in January, with its latest and perhaps toughest challenge. Its impact has been felt far beyond the flood-affected districts. Prices of essential commodities, including food, have spiked in recent weeks because flooded roads have disrupted transportation. The government sought this week to dispel public anxiety over food shortages, saying that it was ready to bring food from abroad. As in all floods every year, nature shared blame with human negligence. A 600-mile flood protection dam was badly damaged this year.

In Nepal, unremitting rains for the last two weeks flooded swaths of the heavily populated southern plains, known as the Terai Region, on the border with India. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that up to 300,000 people were in need of water, food and other basic supplies.

Nearly 10,000 people were displaced, and 84 had been killed, said Paul Handley, a field coordinator with the agency. He added that the full scale of damage could be ascertained only in the coming days to determine how much agricultural land had been ruined and how many buildings destroyed.

Nepal, too, is accustomed to floods each year. But the unusually heavy rains this year seem to have affected more of the country, and with rainwater pooling up and refusing to recede, fragile mud buildings are threatened, and the likelihood of an outbreak of water-borne diseases like diarrhea also increases.

The United Nations and aid agencies in Nepal have already nearly exhausted their supplies of food and other goods, Mr. Handley said, although the monsoon season is not expected to end for at least another month.

In India, the monsoon’s trail of destruction traveled to the north and northeast last week. The death toll since the start of the monsoon in June stood at 1,225, according to the Home Ministry.

The military was deployed to the worst affected states, including Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where more than 12 million people have been affected by flooding over the last week. The Indian Air Force air-dropped food packets to displaced people in Bihar on Saturday, where 70,000 houses were damaged, according to the Press Trust of India,

Pakistan has already had its turn with flooding. In July rains in Baluchistan and Sindh provinces, the death toll reached 329 and 90,000 families were made homeless, the United Nations said.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Somini Sengupta from Bangalore, India. Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New Delhi.