NEW DELHI: A spate of bombings in India has fuelled calls for stronger counter-terrorist measures, but duplicating US or British-style strategies is a tough task for such a vast, socially complex country.

The series of coordinated blasts that ripped through crowded markets in New Delhi on Saturday, killing 22 people, were the fourth in a major Indian city in as many months.

“This begs the obvious question – whether India is unable or unwilling to prevent such attacks and protect its citizens,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, a former head of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses.

Faced with strident criticism that it lacks a coherent counter-terrorist policy, the government faces numerous obstacles in seeking to redress the situation.

India is no stranger to attacks on its soil, but analysts say its security resources are generally under-strength and unfocused.

“For a country that has been a victim of terror attacks for decades we haven’t learnt any lessons from the past,” said K.P.S. Gill, the former Punjab police chief who was instrumental in crushing a Sikh separatist revolt in the 1990s.

Attacks in India have claimed more than 100 lives this year, and critics say the intelligence forces have failed to record the same successes in uncovering plots as their counterparts in countries like the United States, Britain and Spain.

India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has partially blamed the Congress-led government’s decision to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act brought in by the previous BJP-run administration.

The Congress argued that the legislation, which gave sweeping powers to the police, was being misused to settle political scores.

Several of the bombings this year, including the latest New Delhi blasts, were claimed by a group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen, which has forced the government to confront the emergence of a home-grown Muslim militancy.

“India is facing a rising tide of Islamist terrorist violence,” said Nigel Inkster, an expert on trans-national threats at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Originally, most of this came from outside India’s borders but increasingly the attacks are being carried out by indigenous Indian groups, even if the planning and support continue to originate from outside,” he told AFP.

Hindu-majority India has around 140 million Muslims, making it the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia.

Communal tensions have always existed but, outside the disputed Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, India’s Muslims have largely resisted the path of organised militancy.

According to Bhaskar, however, a “pattern of domestic radicalism” has grown in the wake of violence against the Muslim community – most notably the 2002 religious riots in western Gujarat state, which claimed 2,000 lives, most of them Muslims.

And there are concerns that the adoption of harsher counter-terrorism laws with such provisions as lengthy detention without charge, could further inflame religious divisions.

“India is a huge and complex country, religiously, socially and culturally diverse. So the way any law is implemented could be perceived as against one section or another,” said Bhaskar.

In the past, India has focused its limited counter-terrorist and intelligence resources on Pakistan, which it accuses of orchestrating militant attacks.

For this reason – and also out of a desire to avoid Hindu-Muslim hostility – Inkster believes India has “downplayed the scale of the threat” from Islamist extremists at home.

The failure to prevent terror strikes was due to “a lack of timely intelligence and police investigative capacity,” he added.

Ajit Doval, the former head of India’s internal intelligence agency, said the only way forward was to strengthen the police, judiciary and the intelligence forces, while also retraining some wings of the law enforcement structure in counter-terrorism strategy.

“All this has to be in tandem with a law that has to be tougher than the ones before,” Doval said.—AFP