Paul Goodman MP reports from Delhi.
In London, counter-terror police are dealing with a Conservative MP. In India, their equivalents are dealing with the Mumbai horror.
I'm here with Dominic Grieve, Pauline Neville-Jones and that old friend of India, Peter Luff, to discuss bilateral relations, trade, community cohesion (over a million people of Indian origin live in Britain) and - sour irony - security. We were due to stay in the Trident Oberoi.
Dominic's flying back to help pursue the absurd but sinister arrest of Damian Green - a close call, but the right one.
It's too early to make a full assessment of the Mumbai atrocity. But I'll risk one observation. Parts of the Indian media are claiming that responsibility lies with Lashkar-e-Taiba - whose focus, unlike Al Qaeda's, is on Kashmir. If true, this has considerable implications for UK security and cohesion policy, to which I may return.
What will follow over the next few days isn't a diary, but a series of snapshots - one man's view, and no doubt contestable. I'll open with three quick points:
(1) The Mumbai outrage is being described as "India's 9/11". Yes and no. Yes: there are mass casualties, and the attack was aimed at a financial centre. No: 9/11 was the first modern mass casualty assault on the U.S mainland, but India's used to big terror attacks. Over 80 people were killed in Jaipur last May; over 40 in Hyderabad the previous August. Terrorists assailed India's Parliament in 2001. It was claimed to us today that more lives were lost to terror in India during the last three years than in any other country save Iraq.
(2) The terror threat in the UK has a narrow focus. Dissident republicans and neo-nazis aside, the menace comes from those who claim violence in the name of Islam. In India, the focus is wider. There's separatist violence in the north-east, Maoist Naxalite violence in the east and south, caste and religious violence - the recent killings of Christians in Orissa involved both factors - and other communal violence, such as the Hindu-Muslim murder cycle in Gujarat. And that's before we even get on to terror groups claiming violence in the name of Islam, or the tragedy of Kashmir.
(3) This wider focus - based on differences of region, living standards and caste - helps to explain why India is reluctant to concentrate its anti-terror response on any single challenge. Will this change after Mumbai? And are India's challenges easing or worsening? More later.
