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India-Pakistan
Gujarat lunacy seems to have tapered off
2002-03-03
  • India sent additional troops to Gujarat state to help mop up remaining pockets of sectarian violence after days of fearsome Hindu-Muslim bloodletting left nearly 500 dead. There were no immediate reports of any overnight unrest in the state which had witnessed India's worst communal riots in nearly a decade. Defence Minister George Fernandes, who has been overseeing the deployment of around 3,000 troops in four cities since Friday, said Sunday that another full brigade was being brought in to secure other parts of the state after violence spread to rural areas.

    Officials in the police control room in Gujarat's commercial capital Ahmedabad said 427 people had been killed across the state since the train massacre, 225 of them in Ahmedabad alone. Of the total, 73 were killed by police, who were given shoot-on-sight orders following the imposition of curfews in the worst-hit areas from Thursday.

    The radical Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP - World Hindu Council), which is spearheading the temple construction campaign at Ayodhya, has indicated it might consider some sort of delay, but a face-saving compromise will prove difficult to broker. Muslim leaders met Vajpayee on Saturday and urged him to to ban the VHP and dismiss the Gujarat state government.
    It will be interesting to see how they deal with the aftermath. For startsies, the VHP would seem like a good candidate for a ban - what's good for the Pak goose should be good for the Indian gander.
    • Posted by:Fred Pruitt

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