Paul Goodman MP blogs from Delhi
I wrote yesterday that parts of the Indian media are claiming that responsibility for the Mumbai atrocity lies with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. This is now the consensus view here - and also in Britain, as far as I can see.
It may be wrong, or at least not the full story. There's more than one suspect for an operation planned and executed in such terrifying detail. Lashkar has links to Al Qaeda, which has a track record of carrying out carefully choreographed terror assaults.
A key difference for Britain is that Lashkar's focus in Pakistan is on Kashmir, in the east, while Al Qaeda's is in the west and in Afghanistan. This has significant domestic implications.
It's often said that there are some 800,000 people of Pakistani origin in Britain. This is misleading. At least half of these "Pakistanis" are from the Mirpur area in Pakistan-administered Kashmir - Azad or "free" Kashmir as it's known in Pakistan. Only a small proportion of Britain's Pakistani-origin population hails from the west.
Those hailing from the eastern part can therefore more accurately be described as Mirpuris or, as they would prefer it, Kashmiris - even though they speak Urdu or Punjabi rather than Kashmiri, the language of the valley of Kashmir.
The valley, of course, is administered (or occupied, depending on one's point of view) by India. Azad Kashmir is administered (or, again, occupied) by Pakistan. The circumstances of the division of Kashmir during the late 1940s, and India's present governance of the valley, is a source of resentful and bitter feeling among British Kashmiris - as I know from my own constituency experience.
My point here isn't whether this view is right or wrong - that's a matter for another day. It is, rather, that the Kashmir controversy gives groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed a grievance to exploit which is far more deeply felt among British Muslims of Kashmiri and Pakistani origin than the better publicised Israel/Palestine controversy.
Furthemore, there's easy, frequent and large-scale travel between Britain and Azad Kashmir. Finally, elements within the Pakistani governing class and security services have been willing, over a long period of time, to turn a blind eye towards at best and to encourage and facilitate at worst, terror training camps in Azad Kashmir (though some observers believe that these have been scaled back in recent years).
For Britain, it's a menacing combination.
