AHMEDABAD, 3 March — Charred corpses lay on the streets of one of India’s richest and most cultivated cities yesterday, their kin too terrified to venture out of hiding to take them away. Large areas of Ahmedabad resemble a battlefield, with smoke billowing from gutted buildings and the roads a chaos of rocks and burned-out vehicles.

A curfew has been clamped on 37 towns and cities across the western state of Gujarat and hundreds of soldiers have orders to shoot rioters on sight. But the violence that exploded last Wednesday, when a mob attacked a train packed with Hindu activists, killing 58, shows no sign of abating. In fact, the carnage spread further into villages, with mob burnings, shootings and stabbings.

The death toll stood at 415 after police said a mob stormed the village of Sardarpura and set houses and shops on fire by lighting flames next to cooking gas canisters. Twenty-seven people perished.

In the ghetto-like Muslim mohallas, or hamlets, of Ahmedabad’s old city, which suffered the fiercest wave of vengeful Hindu attacks, at least 122 people were burned alive on Friday.

In the town of Baroda, at least seven Muslims were burned to death inside the bakery where they worked. Two people were stabbed in the town of Surat. In Himmatnagar, police fired on Hindu and Muslim mobs that were fighting each other with guns and knives, resulting in 11 deaths, police said.

“The violence is spreading from village to village. If nothing is done to stop it, God knows what will happen to thousands and thousands of people,” said Asad Madani, a prominent Muslim leader. He and other Muslim leaders met with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in New Delhi and asked him to order military takeover of Gujarat and to ban the Hindu groups who have fanned the attacks on Muslims.

Vajpayee, leader of the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the ruling coalition, pleaded with his own people, the foot soldiers of Hindu fundamentalism, to relent. “Whatever the provocation, people should maintain peace and exercise restraint,” he said on television. “The burning alive of people, including women and children ... is a blot on the country’s face.”

Despite army deployment in Ahmedabad, arson and rioting continued in industrial areas, slums and suburbs. Two laborers were hacked to death in a construction area, and three men were burned alive when they got off a local train on the outskirts of town. Government officials insisted the situation was under control, even though district police officers told The Associated Press of widespread burnings, stabbings and shootings in outlying towns and villages. The officials said they had been ordered not to talk to reporters.

India was stunned by the bloodbath. The provocation of Wednesday’s atrocity was immense, but the retaliation has already far exceeded the original injury. The Hindu newspaper reported that the suspected mastermind of the train carnage was arrested in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. The suspect, a member of the Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami, confessed that the train attack was premeditated, the paper quoted police officers as saying. (The Independent)