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Policeman Uttam Chand arrives for treatment at a hospital in Jammu 16 March 2003. Eleven people were killed when rebels destroyed a police post in Gool, 150 Kms north of Jammu, in what officials said was a sign of renewed guerrilla incursions over the disputed border with Pakistan. AFP

A number of recent bomb blasts in India's commercial hub of Bombay, coupled with stepped-up militant attacks on Indian security forces in its strife-torn Kashmir state, could be a pointer to some of the grim effects, rising global tensions over Iraq, may be producing in South Asia.

The identity of the Bombay bombers, who, for instance, ripped apart a peak-hour train in the principal business city, killing nearly a dozen passengers recently is yet to be established, but it is clear that some of India's prime economic interests are coming under attack nearly in tandem with increasing moves by the US and its allies to carry out their threatened military action on Iraq, regardless of whether there is UN sanction for this initiative or not.

In virtual concurrence, militants seem to be stepping-up attacks on Indian security forces targets in Kashmir with increasing hostility. Nine policemen and two civilians, for instance, were killed when militants attacked a remote police post in Kashmir's Udahmpur district a couple of days ago. Prior to that a clash between security forces and militants in Poonch reportedly claimed seven persons.

The question which is likely to be raised is what is the connecting link between these security-related incidents on the sub-continent? The answer could very well be the hostility bred by the Western military alliance's threatened military action in Iraq in particular and its increasing high profile in global affairs in general, which is seen in some quarters as "hegemonic" and unaccommodative.

A negative fallout from this confrontation between the Western military alliance headed by the US and its hardline opponents, some of whom pose as religious zealots, is that states in our part of the world which are seen as collaborating with the West also become targets of, very often, terror attacks. In the days ahead, therefore, states such as India and Pakistan are likely to face domestic and foreign policy dilemmas of unprecedented magnitude.

It could be said that we now have a veritable "arc of armed resistance", extending from the Palestinian Authority areas through Afghanistan to Pakistan and Kashmir. We refrain from branding such resistance as religious in nature on account of the impossibility in ascertaining the degree of religious sanction for violence of this kind, but there is every reason to believe that the resistance to perceived Western hegemony has deep cultural roots.

This is not merely a question of what is seen as "Islamic fundamentalism", stepping in to fill the breach left behind by Soviet communism at the end of the Eighties, when it seemed that even communism was finding it impossible to hold out against the ideological high tide of neo-liberalism.

Already in the mid-Eighties it was starkly evident that even communism, had it lasted, would have been opposed by dormant civilizational forces which were opposed to the ideological hegemony of both the East and West blocs. The Mujahedin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the Eighties, is a case in point.

The Mujahedin resistance in Afghanistan of those times, coupled with the Palestinian resistance to Israel in the disputed territories, were the earliest evidence of the present profoundly cultural opposition to perceived, Western global influence and control.

These early fires of resistance then, have transformed themselves into the current, fundamental global division - resurgent non-Western civilisational forces vs perceived Western hegemony.

Unilateral, Western military action against Iraq could bring this confrontation to a head.