A Mercury News report looks at how Indian Americans in the Bay Area struggled to get word of relatives back home.

“I’m scheduled to visit relatives in India next month,” said Raj Bhanot, a member of San Jose’s Human Rights Commission, “and my children are asking me, `Dad, what’s going on? We don’t want to go.’ ”

Officially, no one knows yet, but unofficially, the jury appears to have reached a verdict, reports Jonathan Steele in the Guardian.

Most speculation blames the Pakistani-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba which is fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir, but the Indian government has not officially named it. A Lashkar spokesman, Abdullah Ghaznavi, said his group was not involved. “These killings are inhuman,” he said. “Our jihad is only against the Indian troops in Kashmir. Islam does not allow the killing of innocent people.”

Ajai Sahni, director of the Institute for Conflict Management, described the denial as “absolute nonsense”. “They always deny incidents in which large numbers of civilians die. They regularly hit army and police targets in Jammu and Kashmir, but they don’t have the capacity to do that in India, so they go after civilians,” he told the Guardian by phone from Delhi.

The group was linked, he said, to the Students Islamic Movement of India, which has roots in Maharashtra state and recruits there. “Recent arrests and intelligence reports of the interrogations have shown the Pakistani state is involved in backing these groups. The cumulative evidence is overwhelming.”

Mr Sahni blamed Pakistan’s intelligence establishment, the Inter-services Intelligence, for arming and equipping Lashkar-e-Taiba which operates openly in Pakistan where its leader gives regular interviews.

Ronen Sen, India’s ambassador to the United States, told Forbes magazine he expects Mumbai, and India, to rebound from the latest terrorist strikes.

We don't have control in a democracy over our borders so we can never have the same security system or as tight border controls as those in an autocracy or dictatorship. Also, because of our democratic roots, there is always a fine balance between the state's basic obligation to protect the life and property of a citizen and to protect individual rights.

But we can do more elsewhere, if countries follow up the pledges they have made [on combating terrorism] with action. We have Security Council resolutions in place. We have to ensure they are implemented, so terrorists can't hit and run across borders. There should be no sanctuaries. They should know they will be hunted down wherever they are.

I hope this will also signal to the world at large that terrorism is a menace that has to be handled globally. It cannot be compartmentalized.

The idea behind striking at Mumbai may have been to deal a crippling blow to the country’s financial nerve center, but it is unlikely to have much of an impact according to experts.

An ABC news story details new technology being tested to improve security for railways, and offers tips on what to do in the event of an attack.

In a think piece, Oxford Analytica — an independent strategy analysing/consulting group — suggests that the Mumbai blasts could further impact on an Indo-Pak peace process that is already on the skids.

President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were swift to condemn the attacks, but bilateral ties, already strained, are likely to come under further pressure in the coming weeks with the attacks refocusing attention on Kashmir. The attacks may provoke confrontation that feeds off the deterioration in ties that is already under way.

Civil disturbance: Singh has appealed for calm, and the authorities are wary of ethnic and religious tensions erupting into violence, as with such incidents in the past. Where Mumbai once was regarded as India’s most cosmopolitan city, the politics of “identity” have hardened, and it has become vulnerable to ethnic conflict, with Hindu nationalists playing a high-profile role in local politics. As a result, there is a high risk of civil disturbance and attacks on Muslims in the aftermath of the bombings.

Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai, muses in the New York Times of the much-lauded ’spirit of Mumbai’.

Despite the long history of sporadic violence, Mumbai has always picked itself up by its bootstraps and marched off to work as soon as the trains started working again.

Our ability to jeer at misfortune is attributed in the Indian press to the “spirit of Bombay,” which is variously described as “indomitable,” “never say die” and “undying.” But our spirit has been saluted so frequently of late, all the praise was beginning to annoy me.

….

Soon after hearing about the blasts, I made my way to the local hospital to see if they needed blood donations. It had been less than an hour since the first explosion, but I’d been beaten to it by nearly 200 people.

When the volunteers found that the authorities had adequate supplies of blood, they waited patiently to help carry victims into the wards. Others stood over shocked survivors, fanning them with newspapers and helping them contact relatives.

Stories of exceptional selflessness have flooded in all evening. One came from my friend Aarti, who was in one of the trains on which a bomb went off.

As she jumped out of her compartment, she saw streams of slum dwellers from the bleak shanties along the tracks rushing toward the train with bed sheets.

They knew that there would be no stretchers to be found and were offering their threadbare cottons to be used as hammocks to carry victims away.

Perhaps the newspapers have it right after all. An anguished night has fallen over Mumbai, but when the city eventually sleeps it will do so secure in the knowledge that its spirit is unbroken, that it is, exactly like the myth has it, indomitable and undying.

Not sure if ‘gaffe’ is the right word for this, but anyway:

"We find it appalling that Foreign Minister Kasuri should seek to link this blatant and inhuman act of terror against men, women and children to the so-called lack of resolution of disputes between India and Pakistan," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told a news conference.

Sarna was reacting to the Pak foreign minister’s statement that

"I think the Mumbai incident — however tragic it may be and it is undoubtedly very tragic — underlines the need for the two countries to work together to control this environment, but they can only do so if they resolve their disputes," he said.

Kasuri is way off base on this one — a terrorist attack, in Mumbai or anywhere else, underlines only one thing: that you do not debate, discuss, with terrorists or with those who underwrite their deeds.