India heaps fresh pressure on Pakistan

NEW DELHI: India on Saturday piled new pressure on Pakistan to crack down on Islamic militants in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh citing a "moral duty" to combat terrorism.

The comments came after Pakistan arrested dozens of members of the charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa, suspected of being a front for militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) -- which India blames for last month's attacks on its financial hub.

Pakistan has placed the charity's leader Hafiz Saeed under house arrest and ordered its assets frozen after the UN Security Council listed it as a terror group following the attacks that left 172 people dead, including nine gunmen.

"The forces of terrorism, inspired by ideologies of hatred, intolerance and exclusion, pose today a fundamental challenge to liberal democracies," Singh told a conference of jurists in New Delhi.

"They pose a challenge to democracy at home, to democracy in our region, to democracy around the world," he said.

"Governments and authorities in our region and elsewhere have therefore a moral duty to act firmly and quickly," he said.

New Delhi had previously blamed "elements in Pakistan" for being behind the 60-hour siege that ended on November 28, raising tensions between the two nuclear-armed South Asian rivals.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said "non-state actors" operating on Pakistani soil were responsible for the attacks.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee meanwhile voiced scepticism over Pakistan's arrests of Saeed and Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, which like LeT is fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.

"We shall have to see whether these (actions by Pakistan) are taken to their logical conclusion," said the minister, noting Islamabad had detained the pair in 2002 but later released them.