Pakistan yesterday began enforcing the ban on five militant groups announced by President Pervez Musharraf in a nationwide speech that denounced religious extremism.
According to reports from Pakistan's capital Islamabad, police armed with assault rifles have arrested over 900 activists belonging to the proscribed sectarian and Kashmiri organizations. They have also shut down hundreds of their offices across the country following Gen Musharraf's televised speech on Saturday.
The address followed pressure from the US, which is anxious to avoid a war between India and Pakistan.
India blames Pakistani military intelligence for last month's suicide attack on its parliament, after which it imposed diplomatic sanctions on Islamabad, mobilized its army along its frontier with Pakistan, deployed its nuclear missiles and placed its air force and navy on high alert. Pakistan reciprocated, raising the prospect of war.
India yesterday said it welcomed Pakistan's declared commitment to stop allowing its territory to be used for terrorism, but wanted to see the statement translated into action.
"We would assess the effectiveness of this commitment \to fight fundamentalism\ only by the concrete action taken by Pakistan," India's Foreign Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, said.
The crackdown against Pakistan's sectarian groups began just before Gen Musharraf's keynote address. Gen Musharraf said Pakistan was sick of the "Kalashnikov culture" spawned by extremist organisations that ran thousands of Koranic schools or jihad factories across Pakistan.
In the violent southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, capital of southern Sindh province that has been riven by sectarian violence for over a decade, armoured vehicles mounted with machine-guns were deployed outside commercial and government buildings and at the offices of banned Kashmiri militant groups to prevent a violent backlash.
A spokesman of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, one of two terror outfits India blames for attacking its parliament, said nearly 40 of its members were arrested yesterday. But Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad - the other banned Kashmiri group - said they would not abandon their jiahd against Indian rule in Kashmir.