NEW DELHI, May 1: After a bitter, 16-hour debate, India’s parliament voted Wednesday to defeat a motion to censure the government for its handling of India’s worst communal violence in a decade.

The governing coalition of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee won the vote 276-182, with eight abstentions.

But the sectarian violence in Gujarat state, where more than 900 people, mostly Muslims, have been killed, has caused some fraying in Vajpayee’s government of 19 parties.

One minister resigned on the eve of the vote and his four-legislator party voted against Vajpayee’s National Democratic Alliance. Another member of the alliance, the National Conference party, which governs occupied Kashmir, abstained rather than vote with the government.

A key ally, the Telugu Desam Party, with 28 votes, walked out of the parliament chamber before the vote, expressing its dissatisfaction with Vajpayee’s speech, in which he said he was pained over the violence and the criticism of himself.

“If I committed a mistake, I accept the mistake. I should have tried harder,” Vajpayee said at the end of a debate that began at noon on Tuesday and ended at 4am on Wednesday.

“There was a feeling that the Godhra incident would not set off such a violent reaction,” Vajpayee said in his speech, frequently interrupted by catcalling opposition lawmakers.

“Whatever happened cannot be justified,” he said.

The opposition motion had asked the house to express “grave concern over the failure of the administration in ensuring the security” of Indian Muslims, especially in Gujarat.

“The government in New Delhi has been turned (into) a passive spectator, while a partisan chief minister has besmirched the fair name of Gujarat,” said Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

“The prime minister’s shifting statements have shocked us all. One day he offers sympathy, the next day he condemns the whole (Muslim) community,” she said.

Sonia Gandhi called on Vajpayee to sack Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, for violating the secular character of the Indian constitution.

Several of Vajpayee’s coalition partners and allies made the same demand, but he has steadfastly refused to fire Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist member of the prime minister’s party.

Opposition parties and human rights groups have accused Modi and his administration of condoning the actions by Hindu rioters and doing little to make the police protect Muslims.

The official death toll reached 905, police said on Tuesday. Human rights organizations and Western diplomats have said at least 2,000 have died. Thousands more are in refugee camps within their state, unable to go home to their neighbourhoods.—AP