NEW DELHI, Aug 17: India's Supreme Court on Tuesday reopened about 2,000 cases from the massacre that ravaged Gujarat two years ago amid allegations of bias by the state's Hindu nationalist government.

The court told the western state's government to set up a high-level police committee to have a fresh look at cases closed when investigators said they could not trace the culprits.

The sweeping judgment will affect nearly half of the estimated 4,000 cases recorded during the 2002 bloodshed, in which about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Human rights groups claim police often looked the other way during the killings and that state authorities have been lax in prosecuting the perpetrators.

"This unprecedented judgment is an indictment of the Gujarat government and the police," said Father Cedric Prakash, a social activist in the western state who has campaigned on behalf of riot victims.

"It is clear that the Supreme Court has realised that the police and the government have not done their duty," said the Roman Catholic priest. "We had given up hope but this judgment reaffirms our faith in the judicial system."

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules Gujarat, reacted cautiously. "The BJP has always believed that the victims should get justice and the guilty should be punished but what is unfortunate is that the entire Gujarat episode has been politicized, which is most inappropriate," BJP spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told the Press Trust of India.

The BJP headed India's coalition government during the massacre and refused to dismiss Gujarat's hardline leader, Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The new Congress-led government has vowed a more rigorous prosecution of Gujarat cases.

V.K. Gadvi, a Congress party leader in Gujarat, said the supreme court ruling showed Narendra Modi should go. "On moral grounds the whole Gujarat government should quit as they have been found incapable of doing justice," Gadvi said.

The court decision to throw open investigations in Gujarat came after it intervened in two cases that had been widely publicized after two women victims went public with their accounts.

In April, India's top court ordered a fresh trial of 21 Hindus acquitted of torching to death 12 Muslims at a bakery. The court ordered the retrial to be held in the neighbouring state of Maharashtra to protect Zaheera Sheikh, whose father was killed in the Best Bakery and said she retracted testimony at the original hearing due to threats by Hindu hardliners.

This month, the supreme court also shifted to Maharashtra the trial of 20 men accused of killing 14 Muslims, including two women. The sole adult survivor of the massacre, Bilkis Bano Yakub Rasool, said she could not testify in Gujarat because authorities were not cooperative.

The court asked for the Gujarat police committee to submit reports every three months on their progress in looking anew at the cases. Gujarat police chief A.K. Bhargav said the police would comply and examine between 200 and 300 cases a month. "We will be reopening the cases and if evidence is found then there will be reinvestigation," he said. -AFP