It has become all too familiar, sadly, to hear news of terror attacks in India targeting civilians. The latest atrocity hit the country on Sunday - the bombing of the 'Friendship Express' train service between India and Pakistan, killing at least 68. However, this attack may have stimulated something quite unfamiliar: agreement and co-operation between two old adversaries. In the past, such incidents brought mutual accusations and recriminations, but times have changed.
The attack near Panipat, some 80km from New Delhi, caused massive fires that accounted for the majority of casualties. Suspicion of blame has naturally fallen on the usual suspects - Pakistani Islamist extremists groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Significantly, Pakistani authorities are making no efforts to contradict those assumptions.
A large proportion of the dead were Pakistani Muslims, which can only cause the alienation of those the terror factions are seeking to recruit: the rest of Pakistan's Muslim population. As happened after attacks in Amman, Jordan, in November 2005 - perpetrated by al-Qaeda in Iraq - the religion of the victims may result in a major public backlash against the perpetrators among the very people they consider their natural support base.
As a consequence, some observers are even speculating that the train might not have been the intended target, and that the devices, destined for elsewhere, may have detonated prematurely. But there's no evidence to support such a proposition. The death of so many Muslims, and Pakistani ones at that, thus has to be considered the result of a major tactical error.
The attack also failed in an area that, in the past, would have succeeded easily. Rather than further dividing the nuclear neighbours, it has done something that decades of diplomatic and political engagement has consistently failed to attain - bringing India and Pakistan together.
Radical Islamist terrorism has become a major concern for both governments, and a powerful motivator behind a growing Indo-Pakistani detente. The latest blast occurred the day before Pakistan's foreign minister was due to meet Indian leaders in New Delhi. The Indian and Pakistani reactions to the atrocity spoke volumes about the new mood.