New Delhi: The 'India Rising' story, a favourite of papers around the world, may have taken a knock after the Nov 26 terror strike paralysed business capital Mumbai and killed more than 150 people as the international media turned a critical gaze on India's partisan politics and intelligence failure in dealing with terrorism.

No other terror strike in India has been analysed in such detail as the audacious terror strikes in Mumbai that saw the death of 14 foreigners - three Germans, two Americans, two French, an Australian, a Briton, a Canadian, an Italian, a Japanese, a Singaporean and a Thai - and over 130 Indians.

Leading international dailies were unsparing in their criticism of partisan politics and "squabbling leaders" in India that thwart concerted counter-terror efforts and the country's hopelessly inadequate infrastructure that makes it a soft target for terrorists.

Concerns about India's attractiveness as a business hub were also aired liberally in international media, putting in question the country's rising global profile.

Many publications were critical of India's habit of blaming Pakistan for every attack and referred to the growth of home-grown radical Islamic militancy in the country. With India again blaming elements in Pakistan for the audacious terror strikes, global anxieties about a renewed confrontation between the two countries are back in circulation.

"One of the major counter-terrorism concerns about the attacks in Mumbai is the failure of intelligence they represent," said Prof Clive Williams of the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism at Macquarie University, in an article in Melbourne Herald Sun, an Australian daily.

"India tends to be defensive about not anticipating terrorist incidents in India; the usual fall-back position is to blame Pakistan, rather than acknowledge major domestic national security intelligence deficiencies," he wrote in the article.

James also blamed the architecture of India's security intelligence system which, he alleges, were dependent on collection by police state-based "special branches."

The point was also raised by the Wall Street Journal, which said India's intelligence units are "understaffed and lack resources. Coordination among the country's 28 state police forces is poor. The country's anti-terror legal architecture is also inadequate," it said, blaming a "lack of political leadership' for it.

In a report headlined "Violence Clouds India's Economic Future", The New York Times quoted economists and investors and concluded that the terrorist siege in Mumbai "is likely to threaten India's already murky economic future and thwart plans to transform the city into a regional financial centre."

An article in Britain's The Guardian said that the Mumbai attacks demolished the myth of the absence of any home-grown al-Qaeda threat. "But this week's attack in Mumbai is the latest in a series of incidents that have forced the Indian government to acknowledge privately that there may be Islamist militant groups within its borders," it said.