Indian troops on streets as death toll reaches 300

Thousands of Indian army soldiers tried to control Hindu mobs in the western city of Ahamadabad today as the death toll in the country’s worst religious violence in a decade approached 300.

There were sporadic incidents of stone throwing and houses set on fire overnight, but Police Commissioner PC Pandey insisted the mass murders, such as those of the two previous nights, had been quelled.

‘‘There were no fresh attacks on Friday night across the state,’’ said Pandey in Ahmadabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat state and the worst-hit by mob violence. Many hotels, shops and restaurants have been destroyed in rioting and looting has been widespread.

The bloodshed was prompted when a Muslim mob burned a train carrying Hindu nationalists on Wednesday in the Gujarat town of Godhra.

Since then, right-wing Hindus have been on a retaliatory rampage in the large western state, burning down Muslim homes while many police and soldiers stood by watching Muslims, including women and children, burned alive.

The government has been heavily criticised for not reacting sooner, though the mass violence did not spread across India despite a nationwide strike call by the World Hindu Council yesterday.

The Hindu-nationalist group is spearheading a campaign to build a temple at the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya.

The 1992 razing of the mosque by Hindus sparked nationwide riots that killed 2,000 people. Hindus claim the site is the birthplace of their most-revered god, Rama.

Yesterday thousands of soldiers with shoot-to-kill orders fanned out in the worst-hit cities of Ahmadabad, Baroda and Rajkot to control young Hindu men who looted and attacked Muslims with swords and sticks.

Police have shot dead 17 people since Thursday in the state. One police officer was killed by the rioting mob in Ahmadabad yesterday, said Narendra Modi, the state’s top elected official.

Modi has come under fire by suggesting that some of the Muslims who have been killed brought their deaths upon themselves.

Muslim and opposition leaders throughout India have demanded that the government step in to protect the minority group.

While condemning the Godhra incident as inhumane, they say the retaliatory attacks are far worse.

‘‘I strongly condemn the attack on the train. This is not the way to solve any problem. Violence breeds violence,’’ said Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, a Muslim political party in the south Indian city of Hyderabad.

‘‘But what has happened in Gujarat as a whole is worse. They have thrown democracy and rule of law into the fire,’’ he said.

In Ahmadabad, bodies blackened by fire lay in the streets, along with burned-out furnishings and vehicles, shredded clothes and other personal belongings.

Elsewhere in Gujarat state, armed Hindus killed at least 30 Muslims on Friday after entering the eastern village of Pandarvada near Godhra, the scene of Wednesday’s train attack.

The attackers forced residents into their homes, where they huddled together as the mob set the houses on fire, officials said.

‘‘We know of 30 deaths so far, it could be higher than that,’’ said Jayanti Ravi, the district administrator.

The killings took the death toll to 295 in Gujarat state in the worst religious clashes in India since 1993, when 800 people were killed during Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay.

The Pandarvada assault came hours after several hundred Hindus set fire to a Muslim shanty town in Ahmadabad early yesterday, trapping residents asleep inside. Sixty-five people in the homes were killed, including eight children, Deputy Police Commissioner PB Gondya said.

A curfew has been imposed in 37 towns across the state and 1,500 people have been arrested in the violence - including 63 charged for murder in the train attack, said Home Secretary K Nityanandam.

Gujarat is the home state of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s beloved independence leader who struggled for reconciliation between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority amid riots that killed nearly one million people after India won independence from Britain in 1947.

About 12% of India’s one billion people are Muslims and Hindus comprise 87%.

Muslims in many areas said police were favouring Hindus. Muslims streamed into hospitals for treatment of stab wounds and burns, but also for refuge.

The World Hindu Council yesterday offered to delay its plan to begin building the temple at the Ayodhya site on March 15 if the government gave written assurance on when it would allow the construction.

Some 20,000 Hindu activists have gathered in Ayodhya to pray for the temple construction, and 10,000 paramilitary troops have been deployed in the area to prevent violence.