AHMEDABAD, India — Here in the adopted hometown of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, Hindu mobs committed acts of unspeakable savagery against Muslims this spring.
Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then doused with kerosene and set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city.
The violence raged for days and persisted for more than two months, claiming almost 1,000 lives. It was driven by hatred and sparked by a terrible crime: a Muslim mob stoned a train car loaded with activists from the World Hindu Council on Feb. 27, then set it on fire, killing 59 people, mostly women and children.
The carnage that followed here in the western state of Gujarat has become a festering political sore because of widespread allegations that the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu nationalist party that leads India and Gujarat, and the World Hindu Council were complicit in the attacks on Muslims. The party and the council — both part of the same Hindu nationalist family — deny the charges.
But official statistics provided in June by the Police Department, now under new administration, show that the state of Gujarat — the only major one in India governed solely by the Bharatiya Janata Party — failed to take even elementary steps to halt the horrific momentum of violence.
The day after the train attack, for example, police officers here in Ahmedabad did not arrest a single person from among the tens of thousands who rampaged through Muslim enclaves, raping and looting as well as burning alive 124 Muslims.
Police officials and survivors said in interviews that workers and officials of the party and the council were complicit in the attacks and, in some cases, instigated the mobs.
"This was not a riot," one senior police official said angrily. "It was a state-sponsored pogrom."
Party officials who lead the national government, while publicly condemning the attacks, resisted opposition calls for a forceful assertion of the central government's authority to halt the violence as it dragged on for more than two months.
Fathoming what happened here in the first major outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in almost a decade is critical for India. The specter of such violence has shadowed the country since its birth.
India, a secular democracy, and Pakistan, an Islamic nation, were hacked apart when they won independence from Britain in 1947. The furies of religious hatred were unleashed, and about a million people died.
The use of religion for political gain is an enduring theme in both India and Pakistan and a wellspring of violence that vexes the subcontinent even today.
Senior national leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have maintained that India's tolerant Hindu ethos has helped guarantee religious freedom for India's billion-strong population, which includes 820 million Hindus and 130 million Muslims.
Until the violence in Gujarat, the party, which has led the national government since 1998, had proudly pointed to the absence of Hindu-Muslim violence during its years in power as evidence of its secular credentials.
But many influential Indians are once again questioning whether the party can be trusted to ensure that Hindus and Muslims live together in peace and to resist the temptation of exploiting religious divisions to reap Hindu votes.
Gujarat, a state of 51 million people, has over the past decade become the country's laboratory for Hindu nationalism. That ideology has long depicted Muslim and Christian Indians as converts to foreign religions who must accept the primacy of Hindu culture. Gandhi's assassin was an extreme adherent of this view — and for decades, the Hindu nationalist movement was a political pariah as a result.
In the recent carnage in Gujarat, most of those killed were Muslims. Among the survivors, 100,000 became refugees in their own country. More than 20,000 homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, along with 360 Muslim places of worship.
The events have inspired an anguished outpouring from many Indian intellectuals.
"Gujarat disowned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi long ago," Ashis Nandy, one of India's leading social thinkers wrote in Seminar, a monthly magazine that addresses domestic and international problems in India. "The state's political soul has been won over by his killers."
In an interview in June, the state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, offered no consolation to the state's Muslims and expressed satisfaction with his government's performance. His only regret, he said, was that he did not handle the news media better.
"We have 18,600 villages," he said in his office, where a photograph of Gandhi hung on the wall. "Ninety-eight percent of Gujarat was peaceful. Is it not a credit for the administration, the government?"
Mr. Modi was a longtime party organizer and pracharak, or preacher, from the source of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Association of National Volunteers. He was handpicked less than a year ago by the Bharatiya Janata Party's high command to turn around its fading fortunes in the state.
[Mr. Modi dissolved the state assembly on July 19 to bring on elections. In the usual practice, he resigned and was named caretaker chief minister while he led the party's political campaign.]
At the national level, too, hard-liners in the party appear to be on the upswing. Lal Krishna Advani, India's home minister, who represents Gujarat in Parliament, was elevated recently to be India's deputy prime minister and is expected to succeed the aging Mr. Vajpayee as the coalition's standard-bearer.
In the late 1980's, Mr. Advani led a movement to build a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century mosque said to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. That movement was critical to the party's rise to power and culminated in the mosque's demolition by Hindu zealots in 1992, igniting the last major spasm of Hindu-Muslim violence, which left more than 1,100 people dead, most of them Muslims.