NEW DELHI, July 20: Even ahead of President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s late evening address to the nation on Thursday, which was seen by media analysts here as friendly and sympathetic, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reverted to his original belief that Maoist groups posed the bigger security challenge to India.

While the prime minister also kept in view recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and Srinagar, saying they revealed the extent of “penetration” by terrorists that made their isolation difficult, there was no finger-pointing at Pakistan.

There was no immediate official comment on President Musharraf’s condemnation of the attacks in Mumbai, but media analysts said his argument against stalling the peace talks with India were rooted in last year’s pact with Prime Minister Singh.

After the initial blame game involving Pakistan, however, Indian agencies appeared to be dealing with a spate of terrifying embarrassments.

As they hunted for suspects in Mumbai, Indian President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was reading out an email on his computer in which someone had threatened to assassinate him, news reports said. To make the potentially serious news sound frivolous, however, news channels claimed that the emailed threat to the Indian head of the state was of a piece with other hoax calls swirling across the country in the aftermath of the blasts in Mumbai.

Police in Bhopal, meanwhile, seemed to have rowed back on another email saga. They now identify one such hoax-monger as Suresh Chandrapal. He had logged into an email account as Jack Smith when he inflicted a very damaging falsehood – that a group called Lashkar-e-Qahar was involved in the July 11 terrorism.

News agencies had earlier named another person with a Maharashtrian name as spreading the same canard, if that is what it was.

While police were looking out for the person who sent the email to President Kalam, news reports said sleuths were also interested in finding out who had leaked the story of the incident at the President’s Palace. A few years ago, a man from Bihar sent live cartridges to President Kalam. The culprit was tracked down and arrested.

Prime Minister Singh addressed a meeting of state chief secretaries to discuss a host of issues including internal security.

“There can be no development and progress in absence of law and order and public security. It is a primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure safety of its citizens,” he said.