The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front — perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India — is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a “well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India’s most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

For years India has always looked west to Pakistan when bombs exploded in its cities, powerless to influence its old foe.

Now, it is talking peace with Pakistan, and casting aspersions eastwards to Bangladesh, a country it helped establish and should have much more leverage over.

Isn’t it time for some serious diplomacy, to improve relations with Bangladesh and work together to combat violent Islamist extremism?

While homegrown Indian Islamists may have carried out the attack in Jaipur, and a previously unknown group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen has claimed responsibility, initial investigations have also thrown up a possible link to Bangladesh .

Police have released a sketch of a man in his mid-20s who was seen near the site of one of the bombings, who was apparently speaking Bengali. Dozens of Bangladeshi migrant workers have also been rounded up for questioning.

Police say they also see similarities between these blasts and others in Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad last year, which were blamed on Indian Muslims backed by the Bangladeshi group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.

HuJi, whose name means the Movement of Islamic Holy War, was first established in Pakistan to fight in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then moved into Kashmir.

Its Bangladeshi wing was reportedly set up in 1992 with direct assistance from Osama bin Laden. And its leader signed a 1998 fatwa sponsored by bin Laden that declared American citizens “legitimate targets for attack”.

Bangladesh has its own problems with HuJI. It blames the group for a grenade attack on a rally held by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2004 in which 23 people were killed.

Dhaka’s government banned Harkat in 2005 and has arrested its leader Mufti Hannan.

Yet last September, when India drew links between HuJI and the Hyderabad bomb attacks, Bangladesh reacted angrily. The Indian media, it said, were “trying to portray Bangladesh as a hotbed of terrorism”.

“It has become a habit of Indian officials to blame Bangladesh for every terrorist action in India,” a foreign ministry official told Reuters.

In its latest report on terrorism, the U.S. State Department said India’s counterterrorism efforts “were hampered by its outdated and overburdened law enforcement and legal systems”.

Bangladesh was also trying to address the root causes of violent extremism within its borders, but the U.S. added that “mistrust between Bangladesh and India stymied potential counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries”.

Whether or not there was a Bangladeshi link to Jaipur, there is cause for concern in India about extremists in its eastern neighbour. Isn’t it time for a concerted effort to break down that “mistrust” and work with Dhaka to fight this menace?

Are militants, or even hawks within the Pakistani establishment, trying to undermine the peace process with India, now that President Pervez Musharraf has removed his uniform and civilians are squabbling for power?

The dust has scarcely settled on another horrific bomb attack in India, and the investigation has only just begun into the synchronised blasts in Jaipur that killed around 60 people .

It is still far too early to be drawing any firm conclusions, but the timing of the blasts is already making some people wonder whether Pakistan was involved.

The explosions came a week before India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was due to visit Islamabad to review the peace process, his first visit since a new, civilian government took over in Pakistan.

It also came just a few days after some of the worst violence this year in Kashmir . India was unhappy that its soldiers came under heavy fire from Pakistani last Thursday along the Line of Control as armed militants tried to sneak into Kashmir .

It was also ten years since India conducted five nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13, 1998.

Now that the army is no longer running Pakistan, is the powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, flexing its muscles again and warning its new civilian “bosses” to abandon the cause of Kashmir at their peril?

South Asia has always been fertile ground for conspiracy theories, and I don’t want to be drawn too far down the route of Machiavellian fantasies.

The relatively sophisticated and synchronised nature of Tuesday’s attacks suggest the perpetrators could have received training abroad, perhaps in Bangladesh or Pakistan, security analysts tell me. But it was probably Indian nationals who carried out the attack, and there is no evidence of direct orders from abroad, they say. Nor does it have to be an ISI plot.

Islamist militant groups in both Pakistan and Bangladesh seem intent on fanning hatred between Muslims and Hindus in India, analysts and diplomats say, an effort which has largely been unsuccessful in recent years. They may be outside the control of the establishment in both countries, and there is evidence the militants have already turned on their former masters.

Nevertheless, the Indian establishment does see some worrying signals from across the border. Pakistan’s army chief Ashfaq Kayani was quoted this month as reaffirming the commitment of the army to the cause of Kashmir.And Sayed Salahuddin , head of the biggest Kashmiri guerrilla group Hizbul Mujahideen, derided the Indo-Pak peace process last month and vowed to continue a holy war against India.

India security analysts allege that militants are now queueing up to cross the Line of Control in Kashmir, perhaps bent on disrupting elections there later this year.

I have lived on both sides of the border and would welcome thoughts from people in both countries.Is the ISI up to dirty tricks? Or should India solve its own problems without always blaming a foreign hand?