An attack on an India-Pakistan train service was as bad as last year's bombings in Mumbai but the political impact was different, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad At midnight on 19 February, firebombs on the Delhi-to- Lahore Samjhota Express left two of the train's nine carriages a choking, caged inferno. Sixty-eight men, women and children were burned alive, the corpses of 35 so charred as to be unrecognisable. The Express was set up in 1976 to reunite families separated by the partition in 1947 of British India into the separate states of India and Pakistan. The service has opened and closed depending on the vicissitudes of Indo-Pakistani relations, but 19 February 2007 was the first time it had become victim to them. Of the 33 recovered bodies, 27 were Pakistanis returning home after visiting kin in or near Delhi. Of the train's 757 passengers, 553 were Pakistani, so the expectation is that most of the slain, if and when properly identified, will be from Pakistan. It was the worst case of political violence in India since July 2006 when serial bombs on trains in Mumbai left 182 dead, most of them Hindu. The nationality of the victims was not the only difference between the attacks. After the Mumbai blasts, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh publicly accused "elements" in Pakistan of "instigating, inspiring and supporting", the perpetrators and froze his country's two-year old peace process with Islamabad. After Samjhota, Singh agreed with Pakistan President-General Pervez Musharraf that the bombings were executed by those "who want to sabotage the peace process". Indian was swift to provide special visas to the victims' relatives in Pakistan. Nor was the peace process hurt. On 21 February Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri met his Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee, in Delhi to sign an agreement reducing the risk of nuclear "accidents" between the two countries. Kasuri also pledged the talks would continue next month with a meeting of the countries' foreign secretaries in Islamabad. "The meeting of the joint commission as scheduled (despite the attack on the Samjhota Express) is a reaffirmation of both India and Pakistan to the dialogue process," he said in Delhi. What brought about the change from the frost after Mumbai to the thaw before the Samjhota Express? One reason is the identity of the victims. The fact that so many of the dead are or are likely to be Pakistani has drawn the sting of India's usual charge that terrorism in India is the work of Pakistan-based Jihadist groups acting in cahoots with its premier Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency. No one would rule out the involvement of the Jihadists. But as yet there is no evidence to implicate them, and "it is not possible to conjecture anything until the investigative process is complete," said Mukherjee. But the principle change is the robustness of the peace process. In early February Musharraf said Indo-Pakistan relations had "never been so good", a sentiment echoed more faintly by Singh. Karsuri too notes "satisfactory" progress on all tracks of the peace process, including the most contentious matter of all -- the status of the divided territory of Kashmir. "A lot of work has been done on Kashmir," said Kasuri in a recent interview. "But it would be presumptuous on my part to suggest that everything is ready and nothing can go wrong. However, I will say that in 60 years since independence we have probably never had such a sustained dialogue on Kashmir -- only time will tell if we can close the remaining gaps." Gaps there still are. Following the train attack, Pakistan's National Assembly called for a joint investigation. The offer was declined. "As per law of the land, the investigations will have to be done by India," said Mukherjee. But he promised their findings would be "shared" at the first meeting of the Pakistan-India Joint Anti-Terrorism Mechanism in Islamabad on 6 March. The mechanism had been agreed between Musharraf and Singh last year as a means of reviving the peace process and as a bulwark against those determined to wreck it. For many its very existence, staffed by Pakistani and Indian intelligence agencies, marks a real change. These agencies historically have not only viewed the other as their most mortal enemy. They have fought "open" proxy wars, with the ISI sowing mischief via the Jihadists in Indian-controlled Kashmir and its Indian counterpart doing less but similar through nationalists in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. For the agencies to pool their resources and work together will require nothing less than a "conceptual revolution", say observers. "India will have to ditch its "Islamophobic view on terrorism, " says Indian analyst Praful Bidwai, and accept that neo-fascist groups exist on the Hindu nationalist right that are capable of inflicting a Samjhota-like carnage on Muslims, whether Indian or Pakistani. And the ISI will have to demonstrate in deed as well as word that it no longer hunts with the hounds and runs with the hare, says another Indian analyst, Jawed Naqvi. It will have to act against those "terror camps that even the most neutral observers say do exist in territory under Pakistan's control." Can Pakistan and India collaborate? "They will have to if South Asia is to live in a civilised manner," said Kasuri, in Delhi.
