INDIA: "This insanity cannot be allowed to continue," the Indian Prime Minister told Muslim survivors of the Ahmadabad pogrom yesterday.
Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee made an emotional plea to end the country's worst sectarian rioting in over a decade in western Gujarat state.
Ahmadabad, its main city, has been the centre of rioting which has raged for over five weeks, claiming nearly 800 lives.
"The poison of religious violence must be stopped," a visibly moved Mr Vajpayee said at a relief camp sheltering about 10,000 Muslims. Becoming a refugee in one's own country is heart wrenching, he said, reassuring the Muslim minority.
Mr Vajpayee declared that India's standing internationally as a pluralist society had been badly affected by Gujarat's continuing violence. Muslims form 13 per cent of India's population of one billion and Hindus over 80 per cent.
The prime minister said the burning alive of a trainload of 58 Hindus in Gujarat was to be condemned, but the revenge killings that followed in other parts of the state must also be deplored. "Brotherhood has to be restored by joining hands and helping each other. There is no other way," Mr Vajpayee said.
The Hindu extremists were returning home from Ayodhya in north India - where they want to build a temple to their god Rama on the site of a mosque demolished a decade ago - when they were set alight by a Muslim mob near Ahmadabad on February 27th. Since then, organised bands of Hindu rioters, with official connivance, massacred Muslims, burnt their properties and forced 100,000 into refugee camps. Five members of a Muslim family were burnt alive by a Hindu mob the day before Mr Vajpayee's visit and Muslims continue to be targeted in smaller towns and rural areas.
Mr Vajpayee stopped short of criticising the state chief minister, Mr Narendra Modi, who belongs to his nationalist Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for his inability to control the carnage, despite pressure from his coalition partners. Mr Modi has been vilified by the opposition, the media and the National Human Rights Commission for his dubious role in the pogrom.
Government deputies said the prime minister was helpless against Mr Modi as both belonged to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Volunteer Corps, which provides guidance to the BJP.