MADRAS, India, Dec.12, Reuter: Bomb blasts at a post office and on a railway track punctuated a row over India’s official language and police stepped up patrols to quell more violence.

Police in Madras, capital of Tamil Nadu state at India’s southern tip, said one man was blown to pieces and five people wounded when a parcel bomb exploded yesterday at Madurai post office about 400 km (250 miles) southwest of Madras.

The Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency said police detained four people for questioning, including an American identified on as “Mr. Schiller”. PTI said he posted a parcel just before the explosion.

At Coimbatore to the west, a stick of gelignite exploded under a railway line just after a passenger train passed. The track was damaged but a goods train crossed the section just after the blast.

Police also told Renters that more than d30 buses were damaged by stone throwing students continuing protests against the use of Hindi, the nation’s official language and spoken mostly in northern India.

‘About 17,500 people have been arrested since the protests began nearly a month ago.

Language is a political and emotional issue in Southern India where most people speak ancient Dravidian tongues unrelated to the Indo European languages, such as Hindi.

The Central Government has repeatedly said Hindi, the mother tongue of about 30 per cent of India’s 750 million people, would not be forced on nonHindi speaking areas. But it is taught in schools, and widely used in entertainment and the media.

The demonstrators also want English, the nation’s “associate” official language, to be retained. In neighbouring Karnataka state, torn earlier this week by religious rioting, police maintained increased patrols and enforced curfews in trouble spots, but no incidents ‘were reported yesterday.

Moslems stoned police and threw firebombs in Bangalore, Mysore and several other towns over a newspaper article they called religiously offensive, More than 500 people were arrested in Mysore during the riots.

In the northern state of Punjab, where Sikh separatist is are waging a campaign for an independent country, a school teacher was shot dead yesterday by gunmen, police said, Puran Singh was the 653rd person to be killed in the Punjab troubles this year.

PTI said freedom fighters cut telephone lines along railway tracks in the state.

Article extracted from this publication >> December 19, 1986