SRINAGAR, Aug 28: India’s deputy prime minister said on Thursday that car bombings in Bombay and a spate of attacks in Indian Kashmir could hurt a peace process with Pakistan.

Indian police have blamed an outlawed Indian students’ group and a banned a Kashmiri militant group for the twin blasts in Bombay on Monday which killed over 52 people.

They also blamed the same militant organisation, the Lashkar-i-Taiba, for an attack on Wednesday in Kashmir’s main city Srinagar, which culminated in an overnight gunbattle in which five died, including two militants.

Speaking in Srinagar, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani did not blame Pakistan directly for the attacks, but said these would nonetheless hurt the peace process between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

“I am sure our neighbour would be conscious of the fact that happenings of the kind that happened yesterday here or in Bombay two days back do affect the whole process adversely,” he told a news conference.

Advani did not go into detail on how the peace process could be affected.

But in an interview published on Thursday in The Australian newspaper, Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha revived India’s traditional anti-Pakistan rhetoric which has been missing or muted during the thaw of the last few months.

Calling Pakistan “the epicentre of international terrorism”, he said almost all attacks in India had links leading into its neighbour.

Earlier on Thursday, Indian troops killed two militants in a hotel in Srinagar after an overnight gunbattle which coincided with the arrival of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Three other people including a former state legislator died in the shootout, about five km from the building where Vajpayee and state chief ministers were holding a meeting meant to highlight a return to normalcy in Kashmir.

Police did not say how they had identified the militants as members of the Lashkar-i-Taiba.—Reuters