Indian police struggle to halt bombings

'Unable to crack any major terror cells'
While officials also see a foreign hand in the latest attacks, they remain uncertain as to groups involved or their exact aims.

"We have to accept that it is fellow citizens who are carrying out these attacks. They may get help from Pakistan, but they are Indians," said Sahni, the former Intelligence Bureau chief.

Beyond that, officials remain puzzled.

"We have been unable to crack any major terror cells and this is limiting what we know," said an official with the Home Ministry — which oversees domestic security — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the sensitivity of the matter.

The names most frequently mentioned are Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Bangladesh-based Harkat-e-Jehad-e Islami or the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India.

E-mail suggests Muslim recruits
The last group is of most concern to authorities. It is believed to be behind an e-mail that claimed responsibility for the Ahmadabad attack for the obscure Indian Mujahideen, and it is entirely home grown.

The e-mail's subject line said "Await 5 minutes for the revenge of Gujarat," an apparent reference to 2002 riots in the western state that left 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, dead. Ahmadabad was the scene of much of that violence.

The e-mail certainly suggests extremists are finding recruits among India's Muslims, who make up about 14 percent of the country's 1.1 billion people and lag far behind the Hindu majority in almost every social indicator, from household income to literacy.

Nonetheless, the latest e-mail does not explain what prompted the previous dozen attacks or who was behind them.

Answering those questions, experts say, would take a major revamp and expansion of India's security forces.

India has just 126 officers per 100,000 people compared to the United Nations norm of 222, and many police spend "most of their time guarding VIPs or working traffic stops" — a prime source of bribes, said Sanker Sen, a security analyst and retired policeman.

Few have the training or tools to do anything but the most rudimentary investigations.

In India, "it's called modernization when we give shoes to a barefoot policeman," Sahni said.

India's elite law enforcement agencies have more capable officers — but far too few. The Intelligence Bureau, for example, has only 3,500 field agents handling everything from counterterrorism to financial crime.

Making matters worse are politicians who appoint loyalists to top police posts and look to the forces as a source of patronage and a tool for going after rivals, Sahni said.

Ordinary Indians, meanwhile, are putting little pressure on the country's leaders to stop politicking and tackle the problem.

"We've had linguistic riots, wars with Pakistan, caste conflict, religious riots," said historian Ramachandra Guha. "We are a society that is used to living with danger and minor catastrophes and stumbling on."

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