The book is due to hit Indian shelves later this week following its release in New York on Monday.

But the knives are already out for the memoirs' most contentious claim in Indian eyes: that the Indian army's desire to capture territory led to the 1999 Kargil conflict, which almost sparked a fourth war between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

"He's rewriting history with an eye on the 2007 elections in Pakistan -- he wants to project himself and the army as entities to be counted on," veteran Indian security analyst Uday Bhaskar told AFP.

"He has got 'chutzpah', real nerve," he said.

"All that he is saying is a pack of lies, he attacked us and then lost -- that's the reality," former Indian National Security Advisory Brajesh Mishra told the CNN-IBN television network.

He dismissed Musharraf's description of the Kargil conflict as a "landmark in the history of the Pakistani army."

"India did not cross the Line of Control (dividing Kashmir)," Mishra said. "The Pakistan Army did and it was defeated."

India has always maintained Musharraf was responsible for dispatching troops across the ceasefire line above the town of Kargil and that it repelled the invaders.

Musharraf, however, insists no Pakistani soldiers crossed into Indian territory and that New Delhi stepped up the conflict after its forces ran into Kashmiri militants who had moved ahead of Pakistani troops.

The row over the book's contents comes as the two countries have decided to resume peace talks stalled in the wake of the July terrorist train attacks in Mumbai, which killed 186 people.

New Delhi said the attacks were carried out with "help from across the border" -- a charge that Islamabad has denied.

The book also carries Musharraf's call for an "out-of-the-box solution" to the dispute over the mountainous, Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, which lies at the heart of nearly six decades of hostility between the two countries.

India says it is waiting for Islamabad to live up to its pledge to halt cross-border terrorism before taking any steps on the Kashmir dispute.

All the controversy is making the book's publisher and vendors say they scent a winner.

"We've no doubt it's going to be a best-seller" in India, said Simon and Schuster's regional distribution manager Rahul Srivastava.

"We expect this could be as big as Bill Clinton's autobiography, 'My Life'," said Srivastava, adding the former US president's hardcover memoirs sold some 20,000 copies in India, a sizeable sum in the country.

In his book Musharraf claims US intelligence has paid Pakistan millions of dollars for handing over Al-Qaeda suspects it has captured.

The memoir details how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid undisclosed rewards totalling millions of dollars for the more than 350 prisoners Pakistan has handed over.

"We have captured 689 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars," Musharraf says in the book.

"Those who habitually accuse us of 'not doing enough' in the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to the government of Pakistan," he says, without specifying where the money came from.

A CIA spokesman refused to respond to the claims when contacted by AFP.

The US State Department runs a "Rewards For Justice" programme promising millions of dollars in return for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a number of key suspects wanted for specific militant attacks.