Lingering stench poisons relations

At the rear of Mumbai's Sir JJ Hospital is a stone building with a red-tiled roof that sits alone beneath the shade of tall trees.

The metal doors are kept padlocked. Outside, a man holds his nose as he points to the building and claims that inside there is a bad smell.

This is the mortuary operated by the police and it is here that the bodies of Ajmal Kasab's nine fellow militants lie.

Yet for all their notoriety just a year ago, they appear to have been forgotten about.

"Normally bodies are kept here for one month maximum," explains Dr Shivaji Dound, the police hospital's resident medical officer.

"Those bodies are being kept at -4C and they have been embalmed so they do not decompose."

The fate of the bodies of the Mumbai attackers is one of the more striking reminders of the subsequent fall-off in relations between India and Pakistan.

While the relationship between the two countries, which have been to war three times, has never been warm, a peace process had been ongoing.

In an instant that dialogue came to a halt and now the corpses remain stranded.

The Government in Islamabad has admitted Kasab is a Pakistani national and President Asif Ali Zardari, seemingly ahead of many in the political establishment in trying to repair the relationship with India, conceded to the Independent this year that some of the other militants might also be.

Despite that, there have been no efforts to repatriate the bodies.

In Mumbai, local Muslims have refused to bury them, claiming that their actions have "defamed" Islam.

Pakistan is keen for the talks to resume. This month, the country's Prime Minister, Yousaf Gilani, told reporters: "I think dialogue is the only solution. The world is aware of Pakistan's strategic location and its role as a frontline state in fighting against terrorism ... If Pakistan and India do not hold talks, the terrorists are likely to benefit and not the people."

There have been several meetings between senior officials, and when Gilani met his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, the two agreed that efforts against terrorism should be "de-linked" from the stalled peace process.

However, notwithstanding the genuine political courage shown by both Singh and Zardari, substantive talks remain on hold.

Pakistan, involved in what it has described as a life-or-death struggle against Taleban and al Qaeda militants, insists it has acted to bring to justice militants blamed by India for carrying out the attacks.

All seven men charged this week under Pakistan's anti-terrorism act and criminal code were seized in February when the authorities conceded that the Mumbai plot had been at least partly organised inside the country.

These men are being dealt with by a secretive anti-terrorism court inside Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi in sessions that have been off-limits to reporters and public.

The seven, who could face the death penalty, have pleaded not guilty.

The indictments will be welcomed by Delhi, yet India, which says it has provided more than half a dozen dossiers of evidence about those involved in the attacks, still demands more.

In particular, it is furious that Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, a founder member of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the head of a charity allegedly linked to it, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), is still at large.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the JuD was proscribed as a terrorist front group by the UN and US and the Pakistani Government said it was shutting down the organisation's operations.

Saeed, its head, or Amir, was placed under house arrest and then released after Pakistan's courts said there was no evidence to detain him. It was a decision that left India spitting.

In an interview, Shashi Tharoor, India's External Affairs Minister, claims there was no practical point in returning to substantive talks until Pakistan did more to dismantle the "infrastructure" of terrorism within its borders.

He says India recognised that some steps had been taken, but believed that more needed to be done.

Of the case of Saeed, he says: "This is an egregious example of what we are talking about. He is head of two organisations that have been proscribed by the UN Security Council. If the Pakistanis feel that more information [to prosecute him] is needed, then that information is best found in Pakistan."

He adds: "We want peace but, in the words of the old Indian saying, it requires two hands to clap."

- INDEPEDENT