AHMEDABAD, 4 March 2002 — Two people were stabbed to death in Gujarat yesterday on the fifth straight day of violence, as Home Minister L.K. Advani reached out to victims of a senseless communal frenzy that has left over 500 people dead.
But Advani claimed the violence in the western state is tapering off. “The state is responsible for the security of every single citizen irrespective of the religion and the community he adheres to. “It’s the fifth day after the great tragedy and the fact is that the violence has been tapering down and the situation is being brought under control,” he said. But his assurances came amid reports of renewed violence in the city of Surat yesterday. Police fired on a rampaging mob as it defied a curfew and torched houses, officials said, adding the clashes erupted in the city’s Muslim-dominated areas of Pandesara, Limbayat, Rander and Raghunathpura.
Despite the deployment of troops and paramilitary forces, rioters killed two men in the city of Surat, and attacked a place of religious worship, belying government claims of restoring normalcy.
Advani said the subsiding of Hindu-Muslim rioting in the state was not enough and that a sense of security needed to be restored among the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the blood-letting. “It is the responsibility of the state and the central government to see that not only violence is stopped but also that a sense of security is instilled...,” Advani told reporters.
He arrived in Ahmedabad to tour the worst-affected areas and is likely to visit Godhra town, the site of Wednesday’s massacre of 58 Hindu activists which sparked the violence.
Police said they arrested the key suspect behind the train massacre and identified him as Godhra’s Municipal president and a Muslim leader belonging to the main opposition Congress party.
But Kamal Nath, a leader of the Congress, denied that key suspect Muhammad Hussain Kolota was a party member and accused Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of trying to “politicize” the rioting.
In the Northern city of Aligarh, Hindus and Muslims clashed late yesterday leading to the death of an unidentified person and injuries to some more, officials said from the city, 80 km from New Delhi.
Police in Ahmedabad said 427 people had been killed across the state since the train massacre, 225 of them in the city alone. Of the total, 73 were shot dead by the police. However, the Congress said the death toll was more than 800, citing information gathered by its offices. Curfews remained in several parts of the state, but the situation was moving back to normal in Ahmedabad.
