Homeland defence: India Country Briefing

The November 2008 Mumbai attacks have shifted India's military focus away from China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) transformation and its intransigence on the two countries' outstanding border dispute back to neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan.

The three-day siege of India's financial and corporate capital by 10 gunmen, in which 164 people were killed and more than 300 injured, ended four years of incrementally improving bilateral relations. New Delhi claims the gunmen belonged to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taeba (LeT, or Army of the Pure) Islamist group, backed by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.

Extended and frequent talks between Delhi and Islamabad on territorial, military, nuclear and cross-border terrorism issues had given India the opportunity to carve out a larger regional, rather than just a sub-continental, role, in consonance with its burgeoning economic muscle and global clout.

However, after the Mumbai attacks, bellicosity supplanted negotiation between the two sides in an echo of the events of 2002, when both deployed their forces for some 10 months following a terrorist attack on India's parliament, which Delhi also blamed on the ISI-backed LeT and another Islamist group.

Although, after some initial sabre rattling, Delhi and Islamabad decried war as an option over the Mumbai impasse, official sources have indicated that Indian military planners were rethinking their conflict-management options, doctrines and even equipment profiles. 220 of 4,969 words