Mumbai, Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) -- India's commercial capital Mumbai faces shutdown tomorrow after a Hindu group called a strike in western Maharashtra province to protest the killing of 58 people in a train fire in neighboring Gujarat yesterday.
``The entire Maharashtra state including Mumbai will be shut tomorrow,'' said Subhash Ashar, a secretary at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council. ``We have been assured support by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh and the Bajrang Dal, besides steel, food grain and yarn merchants.''
The train, attacked in Godhra, Gujarat, was carrying members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council. They were returning to Gujarat after participating in a campaign to build a temple at Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh, adjoining a site where a mosque was demolished by Hindu extremists in 1992.
Tomorrow's strike call comes almost a decade after the mosque demolition sparked two waves of religious rioting in Mumbai that killed more than 1,000 people, followed by a series of bomb attacks in March 1993 that killed about 250.
Violence broke out in Gujarat in retaliation against the train killings with groups setting fire to shops, restaurants and buses in its biggest city Ahmedabad, which, along with other towns in the province, witnessed riots after the 1992 demolition.
There's concern that rioting may spread across India unless the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is able to curb sister organizations such as the Parishad, said N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the Centre for Media Studies in New Delhi.
Religious Riots
The death toll in religious violence a decade ago amounted to about 2,000 across the country in what were the worst such riots since India's independence in 1947.
The Hindu Shiv Sena party, whose leader was accused of inciting religious hatred at the time, has said it will support the strike, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad said.
``We have got assurances from the Shiv Sena that they'll support the general strike in Mumbai,'' said Rajiv Samant, a Parishad spokesman. The Shiv Sena runs city hall in Mumbai and is an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which backed the building of the temple at Ayodhya in 1992.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also a Bharatiya Janata Party member, has, however, asked the Parishad to suspend its campaign to build the temple in the interests of national security.
The Parishad earlier this month gave the Indian government until March 12 to approve the building of a temple at Ayodhya, which they say is the birthplace of Lord Rama, one of Hinduism's principal deities. The Parishad said the mosque demolished in 1992 had been built on a site where a temple once stood.
Mumbai is India's financial capital and is headquarters to most of the country's top companies and banks, besides being home to its busiest ports, two of its biggest stock exchanges and the biggest gold and diamond-trading center.
The state government has postponed school exams on concern there may be disruption in the city tomorrow.