NEW DELHI, 17 July — The international community should declare Pakistan a terrorist state if it fails to carry out its pledge to wind up training camps for militants, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani said yesterday.

“This is not just an issue of infiltration, this is an issue of the infrastructure of cross-border terrorism and unless that infrastructure is wound up (the international community must say) ‘we will declare you a terrorist state’,” Advani told Parliament.

“But we should not expect too much from them,” he added.

“We disagree with the views of the United States on (Pakistani president) Gen. (Pervez) Musharraf,” Advani said during an opposition-sponsored debate on Saturday’s massacre in Kashmir of 28 people by militants.

Advani said the United States has chosen Musharraf as an ally to fight its own war against terrorism but this did not address India’s concerns over the presence of militant training camps in Pakistan.

“Pakistan’s battle strategy is to take boys from Kashmir to camps in Pakistan, train them, pay them, send them to stage attacks and compensate their families if they are killed,” he said in a fiery speech.

“The epicenter of international terrorism has shifted to Pakistan. Even they (the international community) has realized that. “They killed our prime minister but they did not win,” he said, referring to the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi. They also lost in Punjab,” he said of the northern state where 25,000 people died in Sikh separatist attacks between 1983 and 1992.

The deputy prime minister, who also holds the Home Ministry, also responded to opposition concerns over tens of thousands of soldiers who have been encamped on the border since December.

“Your worries on keeping the army on border are genuine but we feel that in whatever plans we make, it is necessary,” he said.

The opposition motion to censure the government for its “failure to end cross-border terrorism” was defeated at the end of the debate.

Opposition MPs walked out of Parliament’s lower house saying they were not satisfied with Advani’s intervention.