Mumbai, Dec.2 (ANI): President Pratibha Devisingh Patil met a Shiv Sena delegation here on Tuesday morning.

The delegation, which was led by former Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi and party president Uddhav Thackeray, spent 15 minutes with the President, and demanded imposition of President's Rule in the state of Maharashtra.

They told Patil that the state of law and order in Maharashtra was abysmal, and this had been proved by last week's attacks by terrorists.

They said that the people of Maharashtra had lost confidence in the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party coalition government headed by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.

Patil will meet Deshmukh and other officials today and enquire about the progress in the probe relating to the attacks.

The President will return to the national capital at 3.30 p.m. By Ravinder Singh Robin (ANI)

London, Dec 2 (ANI): Pakistan is facing huge pressure from the US and the West to curb its intelligence service ISI, the organisation that has sponsored an array of Islamist terrorists, following the Mumbai massacre.

The ISI has been blamed of having links with the group blamed for carrying out the Mumbai attacks including Lashkar-e-Toiba, the group being blamed for the attacks which led to deaths of 195 people, The Independent reports.

However, Pakistan's recently elected civilian government has very limited room for manoeuvre. Many of those who are ministers now have had to deal with the ISI in the past to safeguard their careers, and the intelligence service knows where the bodies are buried in the violent and murky political history of the country.

The agency also has a vast coffer, with revenues coming from an array of sources including a vast official budget and proceeds from the opium trade, and is unlikely to surrender its political and economic clout without a fight.

American and British commanders in Afghanistan and President Hamid Karzai's administration have repeatedly claimed that the ISI had been playing a key role in training and supplying arms to Taliban fighters carrying out cross-border attacks from Pakistan.

NATO's commander in the country, US general David McKiernan, charged that there was " a level of ISI complicity" between the organisation and the insurgents.

Last week the Pakistani Government announced that it had taken major steps towards reforming the ISI by shutting down its political unit. The move aims to halt the organisation's domestic spying operations on politicians.

But the staff from the political unit have not been dismissed but absorbed within the organisation and would carry on their work under another guise. Even if the ban worked, it would not, it is claimed, curtail the organisation's close links with Islamist extremists, The Independent said. (ANI)

Islamabad, Dec 2 (ANI): The deadly Mumbai terror attacks that killed nearly 195 people were aimed to push nuclear-armed India and Pakistan to the brink of war at a time when Islamabad was talking peace, analysts have said.

They further said that attacks happened at a time when US and Pakistani forces were punishing al-Qaeda and its allies.

"It happened at a time when a new civilian government in Pakistan was not just reaching out to India, it was undertaking some very meaningful steps," said Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group (ICG).

"For the jihadi groups and their backers in Pakistan this was probably a make or break moment," Dawn quoted her, as saying.

A crisis with India would play into the hands of sections of the Pakistani military and bureaucracy who are unhappy with a US alliance which has resulted in Pakistani forces fighting their own people in the tribal border areas, analysts say.

Creating trouble with India, according to analysts, would give Pakistan an excuse to get out of the unpopular US-led War on Terror, or at least make the US take notice of Pakistani security concerns about India and Afghanistan.

With alarm bells ringing in Washington, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is spearheading efforts to head off a conflict that would have repercussions far beyond the region.

India has blamed "elements in Pakistan," and has as its prime suspect Lashkar-i-Taiba, a militant group that analysts say was supported by Pakistan's intelligence agency in the past.

Though treated as long-term assets by ISI, Lashkar and cohorts like Jaish-i-Mohammad have links to al-Qaeda, which strengthened after Pakistan embarked on a peace process with India in 2004, analysts say.

The question is whether the Mumbai plotters included people beyond fringe players who have maintained ties with jihadi groups, they added.

"As far as the state is concerned, the state institutions of the ISI and the army, I don't think they were involved," said Ahmed Rashid, author of "Descent into Chaos," which chronicles Pakistan's endless turmoil.

"There is a covert group of agents who the military uses to sustain the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan in the hope of one day winning back influence in Kabul. Elements of those could be involved," Rashid said.

But he saw the attack as a clear attempt by al-Qaeda and the Taliban to create a diversion, at a time when the Pakistan army and US missile strikes have put their fighters under pressure.

The 2001 attack on the Indian parliament by Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad, which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947, was made for the same reasons, Dawn quoted Rashid, as saying. (ANI)

London, Dec 2 (ANI): President Asif Ali Zardari has warned against escalating tensions between Pakistan and India, and said any confrontation between the two would be disastrous for the global war on terror as this would sap his nation's effort against militants on its Afghan border.

"The architects of this calamity in Mumbai have managed to raise a threat on our other (eastern) border. As we have these people (militants) on the run along our western border (with Afghanistan), our attention is being diverted at this critical time," President Zardari told to a leading British daily from Islamabad.

Pakistan is worried that suspected foreign involvement in the terror attacks on Mumbai will lead to a sharp deterioration of relations with India, The News quoted the British daily, as saying.

Deepening hostility between the two adversaries could lead Pakistan to defend its border with India more heavily.

While noting that the two nuclear-armed states have fought three wars, it said the ushering in of Zardari's government had held promise of an easing of tensions and an acceleration of confidence-building measures to secure a lasting peace.

The paper further said a war on two fronts would put great strain on Zardari's democratic government, which is trying to rescue the country from near bankruptcy while also resisting a terror threat.

Zardari warned that provocation by rogue "non-state actors" posed the danger of a return to war between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

"Even if the militants are linked to Lashkar-e-Toiba, who do you think we are fighting?" asked Zardari, whose country is battling al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on its border with Afghanistan. (ANI)