MUMBAI: In trenchant mood after last week's mayhem here, India may step up its adversarial posture against neighbour Pakistan, even as it responds to diplomatic moves by the United States and others who would like to avoid a military confrontation in South Asia at any cost.

Nobody is prepared to rule out a military build-up on the border after reports of Pakistan pulling out 100,000 of its troops from the Afghan frontier to position them on the border with India.

Official sources have denied that India is conducting a similar build-up on the border with Pakistan. But sources among the top army brass say army commanders have been ordered to report even the slightest of intrusions, firings, or any other provocative moves on the Pakistani side.

New Delhi, as of now, is not left with any choice, given the anger and pressures at home, especially after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's diplomatic overture of seeking a visit here by the ISI chief for consultations was snubbed as an electoral gimmick by Islamabad.

Those who saw Manmohan's move as a gimmick failed to see the elections, now under way in sensitive Jammu and Kashmir, where over 60 per cent of people have come out to vote in defiance of the boycott call by the separatists and pro-Pakistan elements, political observers point out.
Well-placed sources said Pakistan Foreign Minister Mahmood Qureshi's stand that the Pakistan government had not been blamed by India does not reply to the Indian charge, allegedly based on documentary evidence, that the terrorists were trained in Pakistan and had Pakistani addresses.

That the Mumbai terror attack could have a wider regional, even global, context has been pointed out by security analyst K. Subrahmanyam, who headed a high-powered committee that probed the India-Pakistan conflict in Kargil in 1999.

The Mumbai assault "is a prelude to mobilise tens of thousands of Pakistani troops from the western front to the eastern border with India".

"Mumbai was a conspiracy to provoke India so that Pakistan could tell the US that it cannot fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the Afghan border due to the threat from India," Subrahmanyam said.

Although India has cancelled a cricket fixture -- a popular game with Indians who are as of now very angry with the neighbour -- there is still time for diplomatic moves.

Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon will soon head for Washington and President George W. Bush, who has expressed solidarity with India in its hour of grief, has asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to visit India. The visit may take place later this month.

As far as possible, New Delhi would like to avoid a repeat of the military build-up that took place in 2001, after its Parliament complex was attacked. It lasted 11 months.

The high alert had not served the purpose that was intended, but caused a diplomatic rupture that lasted for over two years.

A military standoff could only weaken Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and bolster the military that was supposed to have returned to the barracks after a decade, analysts said.

New Delhi appears to have little rapport with former president Pervez Musharraf’s successor as army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, a hardliner on India.