Uneasy Quiet In India

India's Gujarat state appeared calm Tuesday the country's worst Hindu-Muslim violence in a decade.

Officials said there had been no major clashes in the past 24 hours after six days of violence in which more than 570 people, mostly Muslims and including many women and children, died.

In Ahmadabad, the state's principal city and the worst hit in the riots, "the situation appears to be normal," police spokesman Pradeep Bhatt said. "Ahmadabad has been peaceful."

Curfews in most parts of Gujarat have been relaxed and streets were once again jammed with unruly traffic typical of Indian cities. Bhatt said schools and colleges closed during the violence will reopen March 8.

But across the country, people shocked by the mob rage — for the first time broadcast graphically by television news channels in near real time — anxiously awaited any reprisals.

Workers dug graves along a highway for unclaimed bodies of Muslims. More than 100 graves will line the road 10 miles northwest of Ahmadabad so that those who died can receive a quick burial, said a municipal official.

The riots exposed deep communal fault lines only months after India rallied behind a military stand-off with Pakistan and plunged Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee into his worst crisis since he took office in 1999.

"Unless Vajpayee does something about this, the country will be in turmoil. There will be a backlash," Khushwant Singh, a veteran Sikh journalist and writer, told Reuters.

"Right now the Muslims are trying to save themselves," said a senior intelligence official, who declined to be named. "But you can bet there will be a backlash in a few months from now."

The riots erupted after a Muslim mob burned to death 58 people on a train carrying Hindu devotees from the northern town of Ayodhya where Hindu hardliners are preparing to build a temple on a disputed site where a 16th century mosque was razed in 1992.

Hindus claim the mosque stood on a place where their principal god Ram was born. Hindu militant leaders say they plan to start construction of the temple on March 15.

"We are ready to face arrest and go to jail, but will not back down from our resolve to begin building the temple," Ramchandra Paramhans, chairman of the committee to oversee the construction, told journalists in New Delhi on Monday.

The government has said it won't allow that to happen and has sealed off Ayodhya with thousands of paramilitary troops to prevent Hindu activists from entering.

The reprisals by Hindus were shocking even in a country used to communal tension but which had begun to hope it had put such mob violence behind it when religious harmony held even after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Now the pressure is mounting on Vajpayee to act against the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad — which comes from the same family as his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party — and stop it stoking tensions further by building the temple in Ayodhya.

India was born into communal bloodshed. Close to a million people died when British colonial rulers split the subcontinent into Islamic Pakistan and mostly Hindu India at independence in 1947.

After the Babri mosque was torn down by Hindu fanatics at Ayodhya in December 1992, some 3,000 died in nationwide riots.

More reprisals came later — 260 people died in a series of bomb attacks in the financial capital Bombay in March 1993, blamed by police on Muslims from the city's crime underworld.

But after the BJP took office, it was forced by its coalition allies to drop the Hindu revivalist zeal which propelled it to national prominence after the destruction of the Babri mosque.

Since then, religious harmony had held more or less, despite the U.S. campaign against Islamic militants in Afghanistan, and after India mobilized its army to force Pakistan to curb Muslim militants it blamed for a December attack on its parliament.

For the Hindu hardliners, 21st century contingencies matter little compared to the perceived damage to Hinduism and its gods when Islamic Moghuls invaded India in the 16th century.

"It's a campaign to restore the honor of our gods who were insulted by Muslim rulers in the past when they tore down the temples," said Mahant Ramvilasdasji Vedanti, a leading member of the campaign to build the temple at Ayodhya.