GUJARAT was still burning yesterday. The western Indian state showed little sign of freeing itself from the deadly cycle of murder and revenge as mobs of Hindus hunted down their Muslim neighbours in a frenzy of blood-letting.
As the death toll topped 500 in the five days since mayhem erupted, the battles moved from the large cities that were initially the focus of the religious hatred to village after village across the state of 51 million people. Police have shot dead 80 rioters, and two constables have been killed.
In the state capital, Ahmedabad - where at least 100 people died - people in Muslim and Hindu neighbourhoods who had not fled to safety elsewhere were confined to their homes by curfews in many districts.
The scale of the destruction from the fires that raged for days was enormous. Graffiti on a wall on the outskirts of the city read: "Learn from us how to burn Muslims."
In the countryside the violence continued in pockets, with villagers taking up where their city cousins had left off. Army units that had restored order to the cities were deployed to rural areas.
But it was too late for Muslims in Sardarpur in the state’s Mehsana district. Twenty-nine people were incinerated in the early hours of Saturday after they took shelter in a large house from a mob of Hindus.
The killers put live electric wires inside the house, electrocuting two people. Then they tossed in petrol bombs, burning to death six children, 15 women and five men. Scores of other hovels in the village were also set alight and it became a ghost town after most of the surviving 4,300 inhabitants fled to seek safety.
Even while the army struggled to control the violence, the politicians indulged in a blame game over the authorities’ slow response to the crisis.
India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rules the state, which has a long history of sectarian violence, described the killings as a stain on nation’s image and renewed his appeal for calm. "Whatever the provocation, people should maintain peace and exercise restraint," he said in a stern address to the nation. He added: "Burning alive people, including women and children, is a blot on the country’s face."
Over the weekend, the BJP continued talks with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu sister organisation, to seek a solution over the World Hindu Council (VHP) demand to start building work on a temple of the god king Ram at Ayodhya by 15 March. They are believed to be considering a plan in which the VHP agrees to postpone the building work at the site, where the Babri mosque was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu zealots, in return for being allowed to erect a shrine.
The stand-off over the disputed site sparked the violence in Gujarat after 58 Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya were burned to death in a train set alight by Muslims. Police yesterday arrested Mohammed Hussain Abdul Rahim Kalota, chairman of the Godhra municipality, and Shiraz Abdullah Jamesha, a local haulier, who police said were connected to the attack. The arrests bring to 27 the number of suspects detained in the train fire case.
Yesterday the Indian home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, whose protest march to the mosque in 1992 led to its destruction, visited Gujarat in an attempt to shore up the few signs of peace. Television broadcasts from Pakistan were blocked and even television news was blacked out in parts of the state in an effort to quell the violence.