India blasts Miliband for Kashmir remarks

India criticizes the British foreign secretary for insisting that the Kashmir dispute and the Mumbai terror attacks are linked.

David Miliband, who met Pakistani leaders in Islamabad after concluding his three-day visit to India, claimed in an article earlier this week that the controversy over Kashmir must be resolved to bring an end to extremism.

According to the foreign secretary, the Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the Mumbai terror attacks with the dispute over Kashmir as its main cause.

Miliband's remarks were seen as contentious in New Delhi where authorities believe he is pursuing an "aggressive style" of diplomacy.

"There is no linkage between Kashmir and the terror India has been facing emanating from Pakistan... The bureaucracy in the British foreign office should have educated him a little bit on the facts," ruling Congress Party spokesman Manish Tiwari responded to reporters in New Delhi on Saturday.

New Delhi and Islamabad both claim Kashmir in full and have gone to war over the region, accusing each other of supporting cross-border insurgency and ceasefire violations along the borders.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, founded in 1989, was established to fight Indian rule in Kashmir and was branded as an outlaw group in Pakistan after India alleged that it was behind a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi.

Some media reports, however, allege that the group has past links to both Pakistani intelligence services and al-Qaeda.

A senior foreign ministry official dismissed Miliband, 43, as "a young man". "I guess this is the way he thinks diplomacy is conducted," the Hindu daily quoted the unidentified official as saying.

The daily quoted another Indian official as saying that government meetings with Miliband were "pretty awful".

Also, Arun Jaitley, spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party labeled Miliband's visit to India as a "diplomatic disaster".

"In recent years, there has been no bigger disaster than the visit of David Miliband. At the end of his visit, we were having nothing but some... pro-Pakistan comments," Jaitley said.

New Delhi is also unhappy with Miliband for supporting Islamabad. Miliband suggests that the culprits of terrorist acts against India need not be handed over and can be tried in Pakistan.

Miliband also contradicted Indian contentions that official agencies from Pakistan were behind the Mumbai attacks.

New Delhi holds Pakistan-based militants responsible for the November attacks on India's commercial hub, in which more than 174 people were killed.

Pakistani President Asif Zardari has rejected the involvement of his government in the attacks, saying "non-state actors" were involved in the incident.

Islamabad says it has launched a crackdown on groups allegedly involved in the Mumbai terror siege and says it will conduct a transparent inquiry into the Mumbai attacks.