A riot strikes close to home.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Violence between India's Hindus and Muslims

I was at work on February 27 when an e-mail arrived with the news that Muslim extremists in the Indian state of Gujarat had immolated fifty-eight Hindus, most of them women and children, who were returning by train from the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which is just fifty miles from my parents' home. I was deeply distressed. I'd visited the site several times, and I knew it was a loaded symbol. As horrified as I was by the deaths that had just occurred, I feared that many more lives would be lost in Hindu revenge attacks on Muslims in the days to come.

Sadly, my fears were proven correct. Hindu mobs descended on Muslim neighborhoods in cities across Gujarat, sometimes burning alive entire families. The worst-hit city was Ahmedabad, one of India's most prominent commercial centers. Dozens of Muslims were burned together in residential areas. Muslim shops and restaurants were razed. Hundreds of Muslims were killed in the next few days, while thousands have been made refugees.

The mobs were often led by members of Hindu extremist organizations such as the World Hindu Council (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or the VHP by its Hindi acronym) and the Bajrang Dal. But in some instances, the people leading the vigilantes belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) itself, which runs not only the federal government but also the Gujarat state government.

The head of the Gujarat state administration, Narendra Modi, passed off the Hindu retaliation as evidence of Newton's Third Law of Motion, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The BJP's state party leader called the rioting "a natural statement of Hindu anger." A BJP member of parliament from Gujarat was brazen enough to make openly bigoted statements to a New York Times reporter about Muslims from his area being pro-Pakistani spies who make a living primarily by stealing.

Given such attitudes among ruling party officials, it is no surprise that instead of protecting the Muslims, the police and the administration, by and large, looked the other way. Several reports in the media said that the police often connived with the Hindu mobs, a fact confirmed by Gautam Gouthi, a friend of mine who lives in Ahmedabad. A restaurant owned by a Muslim was burned not too far from his home, he says, just hundreds of yards from a police station. Even Ahmedabad's police commissioner, P. C. Pande, admitted his subordinates were "influenced by the overall general sentiment." The federal...