NEW DELHI, Sept 17: Devastating terror attacks in India’s urban centres and exigencies of electoral politics appeared on Wednesday to have put Pakistan back on New Delhi’s terror radar.

After a brief respite during which a spate of attacks in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi were getting to be located among disaffected Indian Muslims, Pakistan’s name came up in a lacerating analysis of pan-India terrorism by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram.

“Pakistan is implacably opposed to India. While Kashmir appears to be the central issue of contention, Pakistan has taken its hostility beyond Kashmir and support terrorist activities and communal conflagrations in other parts of India,” Mr Chidambaram said while delivering the K. M. Cariappa Memorial Lecture here.

Press Trust of India described Mr Chidambaram’s comments as a sharp attack on Pakistan in which he accused it of supporting terrorist activities and communal violence in India.

On the other hand, Mr Chidambaram who is remembered as a nightmare in Kashmir during his tenure as a junior home minister, voiced concern over “alienation” of Muslim and Christian communities in the country.

Noting that India is caught in a “troubled neighbourhood”, Mr

Chidambaram said Pakistan had taken its “hostility” towards India beyond Kashmir.

While there are challenges from across the border, there is also a challenge of ‘alienation’ of the Muslim community and more recently of the Christian community. “The divide between the Muslims and Hindus is taking new and dangerous forms,” the minister said.

He referred to the “ghettoisation, social boycott, discrimination in employment and blurring of lines between the state and religion as witnessed in Gujarat” and said “out of the hopelessness and despair of the Muslim community -- and if not addressed firmly -- the Christian tribal communities too will raise new waves of terror”.

“There is no other explanation for the phenomenon of graduates, engineers and doctors born, educated and living in India taking to the path of violence,” he said.

Referring to India’s ‘troubled neighbourhood’, he pointed out how Myanmar gave shelter to insurgent groups and Nepal remained an ‘enigma’ under the new government led by Maoists, PTI said.

Mr Chidambaram’s comments coincided with a broad assessment of terrorism in India by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a meeting with state governors where he prescribed tough measures.

“The issues in contention, in the ongoing debate, basically relate to the procedural aspects of investigation and prosecution of terrorism-related offences,” Mr Singh said.

“A number of practical suggestions are on the table for tightening the machinery to deal with terrorism. One suggestion is to set up a central agency to investigate and prosecute all terrorist incidents.

This need not necessarily be a federal investigative agency, but could be a central agency which can assist the states in investigation whenever a major terrorist event takes place,” the prime minister said.

The rightwing BJP, sensing the Congress Party’s vulnerability over allegations of soft-pedalling measures to control terror attacks, said it was ready to support the government if it moved to introduce tough laws. Newspapers say the Congress is divided between the risk of losing Muslim voters and alienating Hindus by seeming to be soft on suspected Muslim terrorists.