The death toll in two days of religious rioting in India has risen to more than 190,including 58 burned alive in the attack that sparked the bloodshed, authorities said on Friday.
The unrest is the worst in India in a decade.
"The death toll is 133 all over the state," home (interior) department secretary K. Nityanandam said, referring to rioting on Thursday a day after 58 people were burned alive when a suspected Muslim mob attacked a trainload of Hindu devotees.
The army has arrived in the western state of Gujarat to quell the bloodshed.
In Friday's attack in Narora, on the outskirts of Ahmadabad, about 300 Hindus set fire to a Muslim-dominated shantytown in an industrial area at about 2 am, Deputy Police Commissioner P.B. Gondya told said.
"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. Another 42 people were hospitalized, some with burns over 80 percent of their bodies.
"Many people had already left the slum on Thursday afternoon due to fear that they could be targets," Gondya said.
Hundreds of shops and homes owned by Muslims were burned overnight and gunshots crackled as the death toll mounted. The attacks followed the deadly Muslim assault in the small town of Godhra, which targeted a trainload of Hindu nationalists.
Nearly 1,000 army soldiers arrived early Friday in Ahmadabad amid fears the violence could spread.
Nationalist Hindus called for a nationwide strike, but most Indians went to work Friday. There was some stone-throwing in Bombay, but elsewhere in India, including the capital, New Delhi, there was little evidence of a strike.
There was a curfew in 32 towns across the state and police assumed emergency powers to detain people if they were suspected of plotting violence, the officer said.
On Thursday, furious Hindus wielding iron rods and cans of kerosene, roamed the blockaded streets of Ahmadabad and other nearby towns, attacking Muslims in their homes, shops and vehicles.
M.K. Tandon, a senior police commissioner, said that only "minor incidents of violence were reported" overnight.
In the worst violence Thursday, a Hindu mob of 2,000 people set fire to six homes in an affluent Muslim neighborhood in Ahmadabad. At least 38 people were burned to death, including 12 children.
Hundreds of homes, stores, hotels and restaurants owned by Muslims were torched in Ahmadabad, local media said.
In response to criticism that police had watched silently during the attacks, Police Commissioner P.C. Pandey defended his force.
"Police can't protect each lane and bylane," he said.
Police said 63 people, including two municipal councilors in Godhra, have been arrested on murder charges in the train attack.
Tensions have been building between Muslims and Hindu nationalists who used the train to travel between Gujarat state and Ayodhya, in northern India, where the World Hindu Council plans to start building a temple next month on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque.
The 1992 destruction of the mosque by Hindus sparked nationwide riots that killed 2,000 people.
This week's violence is believed to be the worst Hindu-Muslim fighting since 1993 riots in Bombay - also related to the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya - killed at least 800 people.
The government has called for calm, fearing bloodshed could spread quickly in this nation of more than 1 billion, where Hindu-Muslim fighting killed nearly a million people after independence in 1947.
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.
(China Daily March 1, 2002)
