AHMADABAD, India: A fresh wave of clashes between Hindus and Muslims in
western India has left 17 dead in mob attacks and police firing, taking the
death toll to 850 in the country's worst religious rioting in a decade,
officials said today.
At least 91 others were seriously injured, with burns and bullet wounds, said
officers at the police control room in Ahmadabad, the commercial capital of the
state's Gujarat state.
The communal violence began on February 27, when Muslims set fire to a train carrying Hindus activists returning from a religious pilgrimage.
Those killed yesterday included nine Muslims who died in Ahmadabad when police fired into a swelling mob on the Hindu festival of Ramnavami, the birthday of the religion's supreme deity, Rama.
Two Hindus were killed in clashes with Muslims, and another died when hit by a petrol bomb, officers said on condition of anonymity. A police officer died after the crowd turned on him with knives.
Two other people were killed in the city, but their religion was not immediately known. The remaining two deaths occurred in the Kheda district, about 32 kilometres north of Ahmadabad.
There were long lines today outside VS Hospital, one of the largest in the city, as the injured waited to be treated.
The fresh violence came as Defence Minister George Fernandes was in the desert state in an effort to quell the violence. There had been relative calm for several days in communally sensitive Gujarat, the home state of the late Mohandas Gandhi, India's independence leader who preached peace and equality of religions.
After the February 27 train fire, retaliatory rampages have consumed the state. Mostly Muslims have died as Hindus have set them on fire, while destroying their homes and businesses.
The inability of the state government to stop the rioting, and allegations that police have supported the Hindu rioters, have provoked widespread demands for the dismissal of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the top elected official.
Work in Parliament was stalled last week due to the opposition demand for action against Modi. The deadlock was expected to resume today.
Opposition lawmakers want a parliamentary debate on Gujarat and a vote on whether to censure the state's government. The opposition blames the Hindu-nationalist party of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and its ideological affiliates for the carnage.
Vajpayee, at a public rally in the northeastern state of Assam yesterday, told the crowd that the Muslim murders would be avenged.
"The country belongs to people of all religious, ethnic and linguistic groups," he was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times newspaper. "My government will ensure their protection