AHMEDABAD, 6 May — The country’s most celebrated police official, K.P.S. Gill, has described the situation in the western state of Gujarat, where Hindu-Muslim riots have killed more than 900 people since February, as "exceedingly bad."

In an interview with the Indian Express published yesterday, a day after he was appointed security adviser to the chief minister of Gujarat, Gill said his first priority was to "put an end to the violence and then try to bring the two communities together.

"Gujarat is an issue the whole nation is concerned with and on which the government has to deliver," he said.

Gill gained his reputation as a "supercop" after putting down a bloody Sikh separatist campaign in 1992 that had claimed the lives of around 50,000 people in the northern state of Punjab since 1983.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who is accused by rights groups and opposition parties of inept handling of the communal violence, said Saturday he was glad to have Gill’s help. The riots in Gujarat were sparked by the torching of a train carrying Hindu activists — by a mob of about 1,000 believed to be Muslims — in the town of Godhra on Feb. 27.

Fifty-eight people were killed in train attack and about 850 others — mostly Muslims — killed in the subsequent communal violence.

Gill said he would "evolve a response to the situation" and described the intelligence network on Gujarat as "poor."

The towering Sikh is known not only for his success in Punjab but also for his role in battling tribal insurgencies in the northeastern state of Assam where he was police chief in the mid-1990s.

He has a fearsome reputation for putting down religious violence with an iron hand and in the shortest possible time with a controversial policy of bullet-for-bullet.

A report in the Hindustan Times yesterday said senior Gujarat police officials told Gill Saturday that they received orders to go "soft" on Hindu fundamentalists suspected of attacking Muslims in Gujarat in the aftermath of the Godhra train attack.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee defended Modi, saying his administration was performing "reasonably well."

Meanwhile, the Gujarat state administration said it had closed 18 relief camps set up for the victims of the violence. "With normalcy returning to Gujarat, 18 of 121 relief camps set up in the state during the sectarian violence have been shut down," Navinchandra M. Vyas, deputy director of Gujarat’s Information Department, said.

"More than 25,000 refugees of 130,000 have either returned home, moved out of state or have shifted to their relatives," Vyas said. "Wherever the government feels it is not necessary, we are closing down the camps," he said. But some residents of the resettlement camps said they had filed a petition in the high court against the closure of the camps.