Troops arrived in India's riot-torn western state of Gujarat today to crush religious violence that has killed more than 190 people in two days, the worst communal bloodshed in a decade.

"The situation should get under control now," Gujarat Home Secretary Ashok Narayan told Reuters. Ahmedabad police chief P.C. Pande said soldiers would fan out across affected areas shortly.

The state's main city, Ahmedabad, and the eye of the violence, the town of Godhra, were relatively quiet today, the Muslim holy day, when large crowds traditionally gather at mosques for midday prayers.

Debris littered Ahmedabad's streets and fires smouldered.

Home (interior) Department secretary K. Nityanandam told Reuters 133 people died in Thursday's rioting.

Police said there was sporadic trouble overnight.

They have shoot-on-sight orders in some areas, curfews have been imposed and dozens of people rounded up, but some witnesses have accused police of doing nothing to prevent the violence.

The rioting erupted after a suspected Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu devotees in Godhra on Wednesday, burning alive 58 people, mostly women and children.

Survivors of the rioting said pleas for help were ignored.

"We were defenceless yesterday. It was not our government, it was not our police," Haroon Jawahir, who lives in the United States, said.

"From 12 to eight, there was mayhem here. We kept on calling the police, the fire brigade. The police came, and they told us 'you stay inside'."

The hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) called for a strike in parts of India in protest against the train killings. Demonstrators disrupted transport in India's commercial hub, Bombay, where mobs stoned stoned buses, injuring several people.

The victims in the train inferno were returning from a VHP religious vigil in the northern town of Ayodhya in support of plans by the hardline Hindu group to build a temple on a disputed site holy to both Hindus and Muslims.

In 1992, Hindus razed a 16th century mosque there, triggering nationwide riots that killed about 3,000 people in the worst religious violence since the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into mostly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947.

Through Thursday, mobs defying a curfew stabbed or burned to death Muslims and looted stores, set fires and blocked roads with flaming tyres in Ahmedabad. The state legislature adjourned until Monday because of the violence.

Late into the night, Ahmedabad's skyline was streaked by flames as roaming mobs, vastly outnumbering police, set alight property belonging to Muslims. Gunshots could also be heard.

"Property worth billions of rupees owned by Muslims has been destroyed and the police watched without taking any action," former upper house lawmaker Ershad Mirza said.

Responding to such criticism, Police Commissioner P.C. Pande said police "were not insulated from the general social milieu".

"(When) there's a change in the perception of the society, the police is part of it and there's bound to be some kind of contagion effect," he said.

When religious violence swept the country following the razing of the mosque, police in Bombay faced similar accusations of indifference to Hindus attacking Muslims.

About 12 percent of India's more than one billion people are Muslim and while the country is officially secular, religious tensions constantly strain its social peace. When communal violence breaks out, it can spread like wildfire.

So far, the violence has been confined to Gujarat, one of India's most communally sensitive states. Authorities asked New Delhi to send in the army amid worries about a rise in the tit-for-tat killings in the state where 20,000 people died in a devastating earthquake in early 2001.