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India faces a deepening crisis both on its borders and in the heart of its own government in the wake of the audacious and brutal attacks in Mumbai that left at least 174 dead.

The country's top security official, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, resigned Sunday, saying he took “moral responsibility” for the massive intelligence failure that let the attacks occur; the Indian Express newspaper reported that the government had been recently and repeatedly warned of an imminent attack by sea. The young men who wrought the carnage are alleged to have sailed from Karachi, Pakistan, and landed in Mumbai, near the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel. Officials continued to carry bodies out of the hotel on Sunday.

Even as internal criticism of the government builds, India's relations with long-time foe Pakistan are now the most acrimonious in years; the official press agency said yesterday that the government was considering ending a tepid peace process with Pakistan.

Indian officials have described a raft of evidence they say shows that the 10 men they say carried out the attacks were Pakistanis who trained in Pakistan and received satellite instructions from that country even as they shot their way up and down the floors of two prominent Mumbai hotels and at least 10 other sites.

Security analysts in other countries (including Israel, Britain and the United States, all of which have sent teams to India to assist with the investigation) appear increasingly to agree that the attack was carried out by the Pakistan-based Islamist movement Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), which advocates for the end of Indian rule in Kashmir.

India's National Security Guard killed nine gunmen, but a tenth was captured alive and the NSG identified him as Ajmal Amir Kasab, 21. Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria told reporters yesterday that the man has told police he is a Pakistani national and a Lashkar member who trained within Pakistan. “Lashkar-e-Taiba is behind the terrorist acts in the city,” Mr. Maria said. “The terrorists were from a hardcore group in the LET.”

The group was behind a deadly 2001 assault on the Indian parliament that pushed India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, to the brink of war. Lashkar is widely seen by security analysts as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service, a proxy used to provoke India and justify the continued control in Pakistan of that country's powerful security-establishment elite.

Pakistan, only recently returned to nominal democracy, has emphatically denied any state involvement in the attacks and promised to investigate any evidence that shows the attacks originated in Pakistan. “We should not see this heinous act in the context of India-Pakistan relations. We should see it in the context of international terrorism,” Pakistani Ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani told reporters there yesterday.

On Friday, at the height of the gun battle in the Taj hotel between security forces and the attackers, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to send the director of the country's security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, to India to assist with investigations. Mr. Zardari agreed. That would have been a first and Washington was reported to be pushing the move.

But within hours, it seems, Mr. Zardari was overruled by the powerful ISI, and the government said there had been a “miscommunication” and it would, at some future point, be sending a senior bureaucrat instead of the security chief.

That decision has been denounced as “typical treachery” in the Indian media, which is now full of reports that either side may imminently begin to increase troop presence at a border where controls were slowly being relaxed.

Equally grave, however, is the tension within India engendered by the siege in Mumbai. The 60-hour drama was the sixth major attack in India in less than six months. In street demonstrations in Mumbai on the weekend, crowds denounced the government as incapable of providing basic protection to its citizens.

Mr. Singh said yesterday he will increase the size and strength of the country's anti-terror forces and consider creating a new federal investigative agency. He called a rare all-party meeting last night to discuss immediate moves, including the adoption of a long-delayed anti-terrorism law that would allow measures such as the detention without warrants of suspects.

The current lack of a law of the kind many other countries adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States speaks to the way in which the weakness of the Indian state made the country vulnerable to these attacks. Marine security off Mumbai remained limp, for example, because the same porous coastline used by the attackers is used by smugglers, and police rely on their traffic to supplement their salaries.

Neither of the two key parties really wanted to see the anti-terror law enacted. For the Congress Party, which now governs in a weak, left-leaning coalition, an anti-terror law could be seen as implicitly anti-Muslim and alienate the Muslim vote on which the party relies. From the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, there is suspicion that such a law could be used to undermine the activities of hard-line supporters.

The Congress Party and BJP are engaged in a war of billboards in Mumbai now, each saluting fallen security officers but denouncing the other as responsible for creating an environment that led to the attacks.

The siege, and the often-bumbling response of security forces, made clear that little information was shared between agencies and that personnel were poorly equipped and trained, despite the fact that India has the second-highest rate of terrorist attacks in the world, after Iraq.

Security officials were insisting yesterday that there were 10 gunmen (nine killed by commandos and the tenth in custody) but did not address two key questions: What about those seen to have run off after confronting police in the streets, or said to have been “sleepers” already in Mumbai preparing the attacks, of whom there could be an untold number? And if there were just 10, how did they manage to repel government forces in three large buildings for three full days? These questions will be a key political challenge for Mr. Singh to navigate in the days to come.

The deteriorating relations between India and Pakistan, meanwhile, are causing alarm far beyond this region: As Pakistan emerges as the locus for an increasing amount of international terrorism and as the base for the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, many Western countries are keen to see it keep its focus on its western border with Afghanistan.

But analysts here say the eastern border with historical enemy India could, with the slightest provocation, become the focus for both troops and government. That alone – the distraction for Pakistani security forces being encouraged to crack down on Islamic militants – would be reason for such groups, whether al-Qaeda connected or not, to carry out an operation guaranteed to provoke a harsh Indian response, as the Mumbai attacks may do in the coming days, while Mr. Singh's government seeks to placate an angry nation.