Members of extremist Hindu groups allied to Mr. Modi detailed how they burned Muslim men, raped their wives and destroyed their homes, with the sanction of the police
December 11, 2007 11:16 am Gujarat Riots 
J. Adam Huggins for The International Herald Tribune
Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat State in India, who seeks re-election, has been blamed for failing to stop riots in 2002.
AHMEDABAD, India — Five years after more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed as riots swept through the Indian state of Gujarat, the man censured by the courts for failing to stop the violence is in a tight race to keep his job as the state’s chief minister.
The contest is being closely watched as an indicator of the strength of his party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which is still struggling after its defeat in the 2004 national elections. The local election, which starts Tuesday, could also shape the party if the chief minister, Narendra Modi, is re-elected, increasing his eventual chances of taking over the party’s leadership.
Mr. Modi, 57, is a cult figure to his followers, but a pariah to most outside his party, largely because of the upheaval in Gujarat, one of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The debate about him has only grown in recent weeks after an influential magazine presented evidence suggesting that he may have supported the violence, a contention he has dismissed as politically motivated.
For all the outside scrutiny of the vote and what it says about his party’s view of sectarian tensions, the killings have barely merited a mention from either Mr. Modi or the leadership of the rival Congress Party. Instead, both parties are focusing, at least on the surface, on whether Bharatiya Janata has done enough to further economic development in Gujarat, in western India.
Mr. Modi’s image makers have advised him to concentrate on the economy in an effort to recast himself. When he last sought re-election, in 2002, soon after the riots, he fought on a platform of Hindutva, his party’s trademark Hindu nationalism, which calls for Hindu unity and fans fears about Muslims.