NEW DELHI, India, June 22, Reuter: The death toll from two powerful time bombs set off by unidentified persons in the North Indian City of Amritsar, rose to at least 27 on Wednesday and the New Delhi government appealed for communal restraint.

Home (Interior) Minister, Buta Singh, said the some people were bent on setting religion against religion.

“Communal harmony should be maintained at all costs,” he said in an urgent appeal.

The Amritsar bombs exploded simultaneously in a street of predominantly Hindu cloth merchants on Tuesday evening as many people were heading to the nearby stock exchange for the latest business news.

At the blast scene later, angry people pelted police with stones and bottles and witnesses said at least six Sikhs were beaten up.

Police said on Wednesday at least 27 people died in the blast. They said 30 may have been killed, but the repetition of some names on the list of dead left some confusion.

More than 10,000 Sikhs were killed in New Delhi in 1984 after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards.

In West Delhi, where a bomb was lobbed into a food market on Monday killing three Hindus, police have banned meetings of more than four people to prevent violence.

The revivalist Hindu Shiv Sena Movement, which has a large following, has called for the army to be sent into Punjab.

The organization’s Punjab leader was killed on Sunday, the same day 16 people in neighboring Haryana state were killed by a bomb thrown into a crowd watching a Hindu epic on television at an electrician’s shop.

New Delhi has refused to send troops in the past. Sikhs are still bitter towards the army after troops stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhdom’s holiest shrine in 1984.

In Amritsar, police fearing violence maintained an indefinite curfew on the old walled city, in which the Golden Temple lies, and other areas where Sikhs and Hindus live side by side.

The mood of the cloth merchants’ street on Wednesday was still one of shock among survivors. Congealed blood remained on the streets despite rain showers.

The bombs! Burst petrol tanks of motorized rickshaws and many people were bummed. “Several people turned into human torches. Their clothes and hair were on fire and they ran screaming”, said paramilitary policeman Satish Kumar, who was on patrol about 100 yards away when the bombs exploded.

Article extracted from this publication >> July 1, 1988