AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - Hindus and Muslims marched together on Tuesday through streets shattered and bloodied by India's worst religious strife in a decade to demand peace as an uneasy calm held after days of killing.
Wearing white cloths symbolising peace, about 250 people walked down roads littered with debris, past the wreckage of torched shops and homes to the riverside spiritual retreat where Mahatma Gandhi declared his philosophy of non-violent protest.
More than 570 people, mainly Muslims, died in six days of violence in Gujarat state that erupted when a Muslim mob burned 58 Hindu pilgrims alive in an attack on a train last Wednesday.
Soldiers and paramilitary troops enforced an uneasy peace in Gujarat's main cities and towns, but officials said there was scattered violence in rural areas. One person was killed in a small clash in a remote rural area of the state.
Officials said 52,000 Muslims were living in refugee camps and makeshift huts in Muslim neighbourhoods after fleeing violence.
PEOPLE WANT PEACE
Tuesday's march on the streets of Gujarat's main city, Ahmedabad, scene of some of the worst violence, carried placards reading "Stop terrorism in the name of the Hindu religion" and "People of Gujarat want peace".
"This is a symbolic gesture that the people of Gujarat at the moment need peace and nothing else," a former federal planning minister, Y.K. Alagh, told Reuters.
Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram, an oasis of calm despite a usually busy bridge nearby, is where the hero of India's independence struggle against the British refined his strategy of peaceful resistance, a philosophy that influenced many key world figures.
Elsewhere in India, about 200 Christians, some holding symbols of Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, rallied against communal violence in the eastern city of Calcutta. And 100 people from 15 human rights groups held a similar protest in India's commercial capital of Bombay.
After a few days of relative calm, Gujarat state authorities are bracing for a backlash over the next few months.
"There will certainly be a backlash," said a senior police official, asking not to be named. "How soon and in what way, nobody is sure."
Said Ashok Narayan, a senior state official: "We are worried about it. We are prepared to handle any such situation... Our forces are fully prepared to prevent any such outbreak of violence again."
Muslim leaders warn they may not be able to control their followers once the shock wears off.
"I have been urging people in the prayer meetings not to get provoked and to show restraint," said Mufti Shabbir Ahmed Siddiqui, the chief cleric at Ahmedabad's main Shahi Jama mosque.
"But my appeal is not enough. People are emotionally charged as innocent Muslims were slaughtered."
The riots exposed deep communal faultlines 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.
PRESSURE ON VAJPAYEE
Pressure is mounting on Vajpayee to act against the hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) -- from the same family as his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- and stop it stoking tensions by building a temple on a site scared to both Hindus and Muslims.
Despite pleas to delay, the VHP vowed to go ahead with plans to build the temple in the northern city of Ayodhya from March 15, defying a court ban and Muslim warnings the move could trigger fresh violence.
More than 3,000 people died in rioting after Hindus destroyed a mosque on the plot in Ayodhya in 1992, the worst religious bloodshed since a million people died as the subcontinent was divided into mainly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan in 1947.
More than 12 percent of India's one billion people are Muslim -- one of the world's largest Islamic communities.