NEW DELHI, Jan 15: India on Tuesday stoically denied it was under any international pressure to resume peace talks with Pakistan and appeared ready to plough a lonely furrow of war rhetoric to placate a slew of domestic compulsions, including a budget to be unveiled in parliament next month.

Far from eyeing any peace talks round the corner, New Delhi seemed to have declared an open season on terrorists, both real and alleged, as the Delhi Police arrested four suspected members of the Laskhar-i-Taiba from a hospital in the Indian capital.

It said the men, apparently Kashmiri Muslims, were planning to attack a military parade rehearsal ahead of the Jan 26 Republic Day celebrations.

In an equally nervous Srinagar, controversy gathered over the killing of two Dutch nationals by the paramilitary Border Security Force on suspicion of the two being fedayin terrorists.

A government minister of Jammu and Kashmir denounced the BSF’s claim that the foreigners were terrorists planning to kill Indian security personnel.

Even the state’s Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, joined the criticism saying the BSF troopers could be probed for possible human rights violations.

“We don’t believe that any pressure is being put on India,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao told reporters. She was responding to questions by foreign journalists about gathering world opinion for India and Pakistan to resume their peace talks.

Visiting Chinese premier Zhu Rongji became the latest among world leaders to advise Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to resume his stalled dialogue with Pakistan when he pointed to the “positive” elements in President Pervez Musharraf’s address at the weekend.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell is expected in New Delhi on Thursday to help create the atmosphere for India to begin de-escalation of its troops massed on the border with Pakistan.

“We need India and Pakistan to pull back. We need to reduce the possibility that something could spark conflict between the two sides,” Powell told the media in Washington before embarking on his peace mission to South Asia. He said that there was a danger of war every time two armies were on hair trigger alert.

But as far as New Delhi is concerned all the well-meaning words of caution from important leaders are coming at an inopportune time.

For, apart from a clutch of state elections in which Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party needs a martial ambience to thrive and gain, a war rhetoric at this juncture could also galvanise an otherwise fractious parliament to ease the passage of the federal government’s annual budget, never a happy prospect in a recession year.

Most analysts were sanguine therefore that India would not be seen to be in a hurry to de-escalate its military standoff with Pakistan.

In fact the indications on Tuesday were that a fresh tranche of petitions would be presented to Pakistan as a possible ruse to delay the normalization of its relations with Islamabad.

The latest in the arriving demands is a list of 20 alleged criminals, including leaders of the Mumbai-based underworld who are accused in the 1993 bomb attacks in India’s business hub which killed as many as 300.

Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has now lent moral support to media reports that the Pakistan government had shifted Indian underworld leader Dawood Ibrahim and his associates to some safe houses to deflect pressure for their repatriation to India.

“We know exactly where they have been taken or are sought to be hidden,” Singh told reporters.

“That is not the issue. The issue is that it is our firm resolve that these people, these criminals should be hand over to us.”

Pakistan has denied knowledge of their presence on its soil.