Its gets worse:
Hundreds dead in India violence
msnbc.com
Hindus burn Muslim homes as army soldiers are brought in as Indian Hindus riot in a street in Ahmadabad on Friday as military reinforcements arrived to curb the religious violence.
MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
AHMADABAD, India, March 1 — As brutal Hindu-Muslim violence entered its third day, with more than 240 people dead, India deployed troops to the riot-torn western state of Gujarat on Friday to try to restore order. In the latest incident, a Hindu mob burned to death 52 Muslims sleeping in ragged shacks, police said.
THE STATE’S MAIN city, Ahmadabad, was quieter Friday morning, the Muslim holy day. Debris littered Ahmadabad’s streets and fires still smoldered as 900 soldiers marched through the city. Hundreds of people crowded into hospitals for safety.
Before dawn Friday, a mob of Hindus descended upon a shantytown on Ahmadabad’s outskirts and set it alight, burning to death 27 Muslims and raising the death toll of a string of religious clashes.
After the 27 bodies were pulled from the ashes, an additional 25 people died in the hospital; officials said 17 more were being treated for serious burns.
About 300 Hindus in Narora set fire to the Muslim-dominated shantytown in an industrial area at about 2 a.m., Deputy Police Commissioner P.B. Gondya told The Associated Press.
“We have recovered 27 charred bodies. The people were asleep when the incident happened,” Gondya said. At least seven women and eight children were among the dead, he said.
Previously, some 2,000 rioters torched a Muslim housing complex in Ahmadabad, burning alive at least 18 people, including many children and a former Congress party lawmaker.
Hundreds of Muslim-owned shops and homes burned overnight and gunshots crackled. Local police struggled to keep control as some 1,300 military troops arrived in the region. Defense Minister George Fernandes also arrived in Ahmadabad early Friday and was to personally oversee the military’s efforts there, according to Delhi’s NDTV news service. Fernandes met with Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister, to discuss how the troops would be deployed.
Officers were issued shoot-on-sight orders in some areas, curfews were imposed in 32 towns around the state and dozens of people rounded up.
On Friday morning, police put the death toll at 246, in addition to 58 Hindus killed in an initial attack Wednesday on a train full of religious pilgrims. But new reports of attacks, retaliations and mounting injuries made it likely estimates would rise.
At least 1,200 people have been arrested in rioting since Thursday, officials said — including 63 people facing murder charges in the train attack. Hindu nationalists said the action was not sufficient.
STRIKE IN BOMBAY
Though the violence has been largely confined to Gujarat, the hard-line World Hindu Council tried to organize a nationwide strike Friday to protest the train burning. In Bombay, protesters stoned buses and blocked rail tracks as the strike paralyzed much of the city.
A spokeswoman for the city’s public bus service said a stone-throwing mob damaged seven buses and hurt eight staff in the north-western suburb of Borivli. Some suburban trains were canceled when groups of protesters blocked rail tracks, a railway spokesman said.
But in New Delhi, and many other Indian cities, people were going to work and there was little evidence of a strike, although police were out in force.
ATTACK, RETALIATION
The rioting erupted after a suspected Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu devotees in Godhra on Wednesday, burning alive 58 people, mostly women and children.
Hindus retaliated with attacks Thursday on Muslims throughout the state, including the burning of the housing complex. Police officials were trying to establish firm numbers of fatalities. Three rioters were killed when police opened fire on the mob, he said.
At least 50 buildings, most of them Muslim-owned, were torched in Ahmadabad, sending smoke billowing over the skyline. Roaming groups of Hindus went through neighborhoods, chanting, “Hail, Rama,” in honor of one of their chief gods. The mobs spent most of Thursday rampaging through the blockaded streets of Ahmadabad and surrounding cities, wielding iron rods and cans of petrol and kerosene, attacking Muslims in their homes, shops and vehicles.
Some residents claimed police watched silently as the onslaught continued. Officials, awaiting the military’s arrival, said the situation was simply too much to control. “Police can’t protect each lane and bylane,” said Police Commissioner P.C. Pandey.
The national government had urged restraint after Wednesday’s attack in Godhra, a town southeast of Ahmadabad, fearful that sectarian violence could spread quickly in this nation of more than 1 billion, whose birth 54 years ago was marked by Hindu-Muslim fighting that killed nearly a million people.
DISPUTED HOLY SITE A FLASHPOINT
The victims in the train inferno were returning from a religious vigil in the northern town of Ayodhya in support of plans by a hard-line Hindu group to build a temple on a disputed site holy to both Hindus and Muslims.
In 1992, Hindus razed a 16th century mosque there, triggering nationwide riots that killed more than 3,000 people in the worst religious violence in half a century of Indian independence.
“There’s a fire inside us. Our blood is boiling,” Mangal Behn, a resident of the Hindu quarter of Ahmadabad’s old city of Daripur, said. “What is the fault of those children who died (in the train)? There’s a volcano of anger.”
Ahmadabad saw the worst of the retaliation, but elsewhere in the state, crowds in the cities of Surat, Baroda and Rajkot were on the streets late Thursday hurling stones, burning tires, setting shops afire, and burning houses in slum areas.
When religious violence swept the country following the razing of the mosque, police in Bombay faced similar accusations of indifference to Hindus attacking Muslims.
About 12 percent of India’s more than 1 billion people are Muslim and while the country is officially secular, religious tensions constantly strain its social peace. When communal violence breaks out, it can spread like wildfire.
Tension had been building for the past five days in Godhra and other towns in Gujarat, where 20,000 people died in a devastating earthquake in early 2001.
Hindu nationalists traveled by train across Gujarat to and from Ayodhya, in northern India, where the World Hindu Council vows to build a temple to the Hindu god Rama on the ruins of the mosque that was demolished in 1992.
Bhargava said the Hindu activists often refused to pay for food taken from Muslim vendors at the stations and brandished sticks as they shouted slogans, causing resentment and anger to build up.
Rajendra Singh, the police superintendent in northern Uttar Pradesh, said 10,000 paramilitary troops had surrounded Ayodhya to prevent violence. Some 20,000 Hindu activists have gathered to pray for the temple construction.
The Hindu Council rejected Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s plea to help keep peace by dropping the plan to erect the Rama temple, a move which defies court orders. Vajpayee has strongly supported the temple construction, but said the government opposes it being done by force. |
