NEW DELHI, India -- Police fired into the air today to disperse thousands of Hindus and Sikhs rampaging through a northern city after the killing of a Hindu leader, officials said.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's government dispatched paramilitary troops and imposed a 48-hour curfew on Amritsar after mobs set fire to a temple, shops, buses, police and private vehicles, and tried to stop firefighters from putting out the blazes, officials said.
The rioting broke out after two Sikh terrorists opened fire on a shop owned by Harbans Lal Khanna, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, killing him, his bodyguard and a customer.
The attack in the Sikh holy city, 225 miles northwest of New Delhi, pushed to 118 the number of people killed since Feb. 14 in religious violence in Punjab state, neighboring Haryana and New Delhi.
As word of the killing spread, thousands of Hindus and Sikhs poured into the streets, hurling rocks at each other and setting fire to a temple in the Gopal Nagar area, four shops and numerous buses and vehicles.
Police fired several rounds into the air to disperse the mobs, the reports said. No one was hurt in the shooting.
The Punjab state government also imposed a curfew in Jalandhar, 50 miles southeast of Amritsar, as a precautionary measure.
Khanna, 55, was district president of the Hindu-backed Bharatiya Janata Party and had been a member of the state legislature from Amritsar, 225 miles north of New Delhi.
On Sunday, the national executive of the Bharatiya Janata Party accused the federal government of a compromise offer to militant Sikhs that 'smacked of appeasement' and could be seen as an 'act of surrender (to) the threats,' the United News of India said.
Sikhs have staged protests demanding the Indian constitution be amended to reflect a separate identity for the Sikhs, who have waged a 20-month campaign to secure greater political and economic autonomy in the northern state of Punjab. Sikhs broke from Hinduism in the 1500s, and its followers consider it a separate religion.
Mrs. Gandhi has pledged to amend article 25 of the constitution, which lumps Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs together in a single phrase.
In response to the government offer, Sikh militants called off a mass burning of the constitution scheduled for today.
The shootings in Amritsar followed an attack Sunday in the town of Rayya, 20 miles away, in which terrorists lobbed three grenades at members of a Sikh breakaway group, killing four people and injuring 31 others.
On Feb. 14, the religious tensions erupted into widespread rioting between Sikhs and Hindus, causing more than 100 deaths in Punjab and adjoining Haryana state.
