A few months ago I sat in a friend’s living room in Lahore and listened to one of India’s greatest classical Hindustani singers, Shubha Mudgal, perform with a renowned Pakistani singer, Tina Sani. We were barely seated when the power went off, a common occurrence in Pakistan. Candles were lit, making the evening more magical.

The two songstresses had been brought together by Beyond Borders TV, a production company that tries to promote regional understanding. That evening India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars over the past 60 years, seemed to have far more in common than dividing them.

As the singers finished each other’s Hindu thumris, Sufi chants, and ghazals from Pakistan’s best-known poet, Faiz, the gathered Pakistani writers and academics agreed it was time to end the enmity.

But the headlines next morning were once again of war. For, as we listened to the singing, only 200 miles away troops were exchanging gunfire on the line of control that divides Kashmir — the area that has provoked two of the three wars.

I thought of that candlelit evening when the terrible news started coming in on Wednesday of the Mumbai massacre. It was clearly only a matter of time before fingers would be pointed at Pakistan. For whenever some outrage occurs, the knee-jerk reaction in India and Pakistan has always been to blame the other rather than look for the enemy within.

Sure enough, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was soon talking of “forces outside the country”. By Friday his foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, was openly blaming Pakistan.

With some reason. From 9/11 on, almost every terrorist attack, including the July 7 bombings in London, has had some connection to Pakistan.

Would-be suicide bombers gravitate towards one of Pakistan’s militant Islamic groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) or Jaish-e-Muhammad (JM), set up by its powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in the 1980s to fight as proxies in Kashmir.

These groups have also been used to provoke sectarian violence within Pakistan as a justification for military rule.

In 2002 Pakistan bowed to US pressure to ban them, but they simply re-formed under different names. I visited the headquarters of the supposedly banned LT where they were still openly training. Over the past two years, as pressure has again increased, they have moved their camps into Pakistani Kashmir and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda has its base.

The co-ordination and confidence of the Mumbai attackers suggested considerable training and the backing of a well-organised group. US intelligence experts say evidence they have seen points to LT or JM, both of which have a track record of attacks against India.

It is unclear whether ISI is still involved or whether these organisations have become a Frankenstein’s monster they can no longer control.

What has changed is the general attitude in Pakistan. When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, or the Marriott hotel bombed in Islamabad in September, there was no real attempt to blame India.

Pakistan’s democratic government, which took power in March after nine years of military rule, knows its real threat comes from within its own borders. Pakistan has had more suicide bombs than Iraq over the past year and has lost around 1,000 troops fighting terrorism in the tribal areas.

Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, on becoming president in September, told me peace with India is necessary both

for Pakistan’s economic development and to end the conflict in Afghanistan. It would also curtail the need for Pakistan to have such a vast army.

This is not just rhetoric. Last weekend Zardari offered to withdraw Pakistan’s first-strike nuclear threat, sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, allow visa-free travel and create an EU-style economic zone with India.

His foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was in Delhi discussing these issues when the terrorists struck.

“Whoever did this wants to derail any progress towards peace,” said one of his fellow ministers after the attacks.

While vehemently denying Pakistani involvement in Mumbai, Islamabad has been quick to co-operate. On Friday, when Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, was called by his Indian counterpart to say they had evidence some of the terrorists came from Karachi, he surprised Singh by agreeing to his request to send the head of ISI to Delhi for the purpose of sharing evidence.

“I told him that we want excellent relations with India,” said Gilani. “We don’t want to fight with each other. There should be no blame game. We have nothing to hide.”

Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha would have been the first director-general of ISI to visit India in connection with the investigation of a terror attack. However, within hours of the announcement, a new statement was issued saying it would not be the director-general but one of his officers who went to Delhi.

As Pakistani ministers admit, the problem is that their government might want peace, but the ever-powerful military might not. One complained: “First the generals don’t want to give up their F-16s, and there would be no need of those if we had good relations with Delhi. Secondly, even if army HQ agreed, that doesn’t mean ISI is on side. And even if ISI agreed, we don’t even know if they can control what they created.”

Sadly for the millions in India and Pakistan who want peace, the events of last week mean that, for the time being, any more sharing of music is likely to be to a martial beat.

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