Minister tries to justify violence

INDIA: India sent additional troops to western Gujarat yesterday to restore calm after the death toll in the continuing sectarian violence passed the 500 mark. Most of the victims were Muslims.

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction," the Gujarat chief minister, Mr Narinder Modi, said in what his own officials conceded was a "cynical justification" of four days of rioting.

Mr Modi, who belongs to the Hindu nationalist ruling party, added that Gujarat's 50 million people had shown "remarkable restraint under grave provocation".

The rioting followed last Wednesday's massacre of a trainload of 58 Hindu activists allegedly by a Muslim mob at Godhra, 95 miles east of the state's largest city Ahmadabad. Hundreds of soldiers patrolled Ahmdabad and neighbouring trouble spots yesterday, but not in sufficient numbers to reach the state's remote regions to where the killings have now spread.

Despite official claims that order has been restored, a Hindu mob demolished a mosque in Ahmadabad city centre, close to a police precinct. Attempts by a foreign camera crew to report the demolition elicited no response from the authorities.

"It was a frustrating exercise with no one wanting to get involved," Mr Venkat Narayan said. There was no military present and the paramilitary unit he approached for help, disappeared on seeing the 500-strong Hindu mob.

Police said 427 people had died in the state since the train massacre that began the wave of revenge killings, 225 of them in Ahmadabad alone. Of these, 73 were killed by police after they were given shoot-on-sight orders.

While a curfew was still being enforced in certain parts of Ahmadabad, an air of normality was returning.

A few vehicles and residents were out on streets and enthusiasts played cricket with tennis balls on empty roads lined with burned-out cars, stones, shattered glass and other reminders of days of rioting.

But Muslims, the stupefied survivors of grisly massacres and the unchecked orgy of violence and arson that lasted 30 hours, were benumbed. They said the police stood by, or in some cases encouraged the rioters as they went on the rampage, burning entire families alive in their homes.

"The police actively supported the rioters, almost as if they were accompanying them, " a woman who lost six family members, and whose husband is missing, said from her hospital bed.