EVER since 9/11, I have received dozens of e-mails from Indian readers, pointing out that Indian Muslims had not been swayed by the wave of terrorism under the banner of Islam. They asked if this was due to the democratic system they lived under.

And when I pointed to the ongoing armed conflict in Kashmir, they insisted that it was due to Pakistani interference, and was not an indigenous phenomenon.

Alas, the recent train bombings in Mumbai seem to have laid this urban myth to rest. Of course, the Indian media and government have been quick to point the finger at Pakistan. Islamabad has been equally quick in rejecting any responsibility. But the atrocity and its fallout have clearly slowed the process of normalisation that was moving along, albeit at a snail’s pace. Despite its disappointingly slow progress, the fact is that the subcontinent is a different place than it was four years ago. And the possible derailment of the slow train to peace obviously suits the agenda of those forces fanning the flames of violence.

No rational observer could deny that despite his Kargil baggage, General Musharraf has invested enormous time and energy in pushing the peace process forward. If he can be faulted for anything in this area, it is for his excessive zeal and impatience that has often led people, especially in India, to misunderstand his intentions.

The objective truth is that the Pakistan army no longer has the stomach for a war with India. Its corporate interests — and they are vast and varied — lie in normalising ties with its old foe. Militarily, Musharraf is too preoccupied with the Afghan border and the Balochistan uprising to want to open a third front. And politically, he is riding a tiger, an act that requires great agility and focus. The last thing he would want is another confrontation with our giant neighbour.

But the very compromises he has been forced to make to survive have empowered and encouraged the forces that would gain from the Mumbai blasts. By working tirelessly to crush the centrist parties of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, he has ensured the ascendancy of the religious parties. And as he has been forced to take on the Taliban and their local supporters in the tribal areas on American insistence, he finds he cannot simultaneously take on the Kashmir jihadis.

Isolated and dependent on the support of mullahs in parliament, especially after the MQM’s threatened resignation from his shaky coalition, he is in no position to stamp out outfits like the Lashkar-i-Taiba and their many offshoots.

The ISI and sundry intelligence organisations have also been harbouring violent militias to further their agenda in Kashmir. For years now, they have been fighting a proxy war in the disputed valley, using freedom fighters to force concessions from India. Although these tactics have not gone according to plan, our spooks and sundry hawks feel they have been instrumental in tying down hundreds of thousands of Indian troops.

When Maulana Azhar Mahmood, the fire-breathing cleric freed in the Kandahar hijacking in 2000, openly recruits for the Kashmir jihad, what kind of signal does this send? And when Dawood Ibrahim, the Mumbai mafia boss, widely believed to be behind the bombing of the Mumbai stock exchange a few years ago, is reported by a respected Pakistani magazine to be living comfortably in Karachi, how do we distance ourselves from charges of harbouring a criminal?

So while I doubt very much that anybody in authority in Islamabad sanctioned the recent attacks on the trains in Mumbai, the fact is that we have not cracked down hard enough on the individuals and the organisations that are engaging in violence in our region. Indeed, over the years, Pakistan has come to be seen as a haven for violent terrorists from all over the world. And if we have been successful in killing and arresting many of them, it is because they are living right here.

An Indian reader wrote recently, asking how Islamabad expects India to provide proof of Pakistani complicity in the Mumbai attacks. He went on to ask what proof the Americans provided us when Musharraf abruptly changed tack on the Taliban immediately after 9/11. Or, for that matter, what proof did the British give us after the 7/7 attacks in London when Musharaf ordered a crackdown on foreign students in Pakistani madressahs?

The truth is that there is seldom a smoking gun after such atrocities. If the plot succeeds, the evidence is usually destroyed. In any case, unless a culprit is caught red-handed, it is virtually impossible to prepare a case that will stand up in a court of law. But one thing is clear: there are vested interests that would like to torpedo the normalisation process. For the armed forces and intelligence agencies on both sides, hostility keeps their budgets bloated. And for the jihadi leadership, donations from the gullible as well as from covert sources keep them in luxury homes and cars. Why would these people want the gravy train to stop?

For years, Pakistan insisted that Kashmir had to be tackled first before other issues like trade and travel could be resolved. India’s mantra was to put Kashmir on the backburner while confidence-building measures were discussed in the early phase of negotiations. As it happens, we have made progress on a broad front of bilateral matters, but Kashmir remains frozen. I had earlier supported the concept of improving the atmosphere before tackling Kashmir, the thorniest problem of them all. But after Mumbai, I can see that this approach renders the entire process vulnerable to the threat of sabotage by the actions of the violent few who have the power to provoke renewed tension through their terrorist acts.

Clearly, the fate of well over a billion people cannot be allowed to remain in the hands of a few fanatical groups and some demented spooks. The Mumbai blasts brought Indian suspicions surging to the fore. The only way to emasculate the enemies of peace is to remove the cause that gives them the excuse to kill innocent people in Kashmir and elsewhere. Over the years, many proposals for a peaceful resolution of this intractable problem have been floated. Surely one of them should be acceptable to the three parties.

The alternative is the current state of no-war, no-peace. And as we have just seen, this is a powder-keg waiting for a spark.