GANDHINAGAR, India, 25 September — Gunmen killed 30 people in an attack on an Indian Hindu temple yesterday that could reignite communal unrest and raise tensions with Pakistan. Police said more than 70 people were also injured in the attack and a further 100 people were feared trapped inside with the unidentified gunmen who stormed the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar, the capital of western Gujarat state.
Indian Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, blamed “the enemies of the country” for the attack and said four children and six women were among the dead. Gujarat is still recovering from the country’s worst Hindu-Muslim bloodshed in a decade in February and March, which started after a mob burned 59 Hindus to death, triggering reprisals in which at least 1,000, mostly Muslims, died.
Police said the raid had stoked fears of fresh communal violence, particularly in Gujarat commercial capital Ahmedabad. “There is tension and fear in Ahmedabad. People are scared that something could happen at night,” K.K. Mysorewala, duty state intelligence police inspector, told reporters. The Home Ministry called a high-level security meeting as communally-sensitive Indian states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu sounded the highest security alert, officials here said.
An extremist Hindu group linked to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party plans to call a strike to protest the attack. “We are holding a meeting later today to decide on it. It could either be a statewide strike or a national strike,” Jaideep Patel, general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Gujarat unit told reporters.
Hundreds of anxious relatives gathered at the main gates of the temple, as Indian rescue and security forces rushed to the area and pulled out the dead and injured on stretchers. “I heard a loud noise and gunshots. I didn’t know what was happening. Then we were told by the temple trustees to get inside a room,” said survivor Gurumukh Palwani, 40, who managed to get out of the temple with his two children. “There were about 600 people at the time of the attack,” he said.
Advani said according to initial information, the gunmen, armed with AK-47s and grenades, drove up to the temple complex in a car, jumped a fence and shot dead a woman nearby. “They next shot dead a temple volunteer and then started hurling grenades,” Advani quoted a monk as saying.” Without naming Pakistan, he implicitly pointed a finger at Islamabad by saying that “the enemies of the country” were using the attack to shift attention from disputed Kashmir, where state elections are currently under way in Indian Kashmir. “I see in this a very deliberate design,” he told reporters.
