AHMEDABAD, March 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - India sent additional troops to Gujarat state on Sunday to help stop remaining pockets of sectarian violence after days of fearsome Hindu-Muslim bloodletting left nearly 500 dead, the vast majority of whom are Muslims.

Further incidents of arson and looting have been reported from villages in the state, although the main cities are now said to be relatively calm, BBC's online service reported.

Sporadic cases of violence have been reported on Saturday night largely from some rural areas around Surat state, the Indian daily newspaper, Times of India online reported.

Muslim leaders met Vajpayee on Saturday and urged him to ban the VHP and dismiss the Gujarat state government.

Defense Minister George Fernandes, who has been overseeing the deployment of around 3,000 troops in four cities since Friday, said another full brigade was being brought in to secure other parts of the state after violence spread to rural areas, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Officials in the police control room in Gujarat's commercial capital Ahmedabad said 427 people had been killed across the state since the train attack, 225 of them in Ahmedabad alone. They said 73 people have died in police firing while over 2,500 have been arrested in the state over the last five days, Times of India reported.

Ahmedabad has been worst affected accounting for 225 deaths. This is followed by 43 in Mehsana, 27 in Godra, 15 in Gandhinagar and Barod and 9 in Anand, they said, the paper added.

Curfews were still in place in some quarters of Ahmedabad, but the situation was slowly edging back to normal with vehicles and residents out on streets still littered with burned out cars, stones, shattered glass and other reminders of the previous days' carnage. "Most parts of Gujarat are now very quiet," one control room official said.

In an appeal for calm broadcast on state-run television Saturday, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said the violence was a "disgrace to the nation" which had tarnished India's image in the world.

Meanwhile, Home Minister LK Advani arrived in Ahmedabad on Sunday to tour some of the worst-affected areas.

The army had been called out in Gujarat after the state authorities were pilloried in the national press for failing to take swift and sufficient preventative measures to curb the violence after the initial train incident.

Many Muslim residents -- the main victims of the mob riots -- said the police had simply stood by or in some cases even encouraged the rioters as they went on the rampage, burning entire families alive in their homes.

The violence may have waned, but the hostility and resentment of those who suffered made for an uneasy calm. "I will never forget or forgive. No one who goes through such an experience would forgive," said Muslim retailer Bismullah Shamshudin, who had seen five of his neighbours hacked to death.

"The army cannot mend broken relationships ... the army can only fire shots to control a situation," Fernandes acknowledged.

Despite isolated incidents in other communally sensitive parts of India, the violence was largely restricted to Gujarat.

However, the sense of national crisis was palpable and Vajpayee's government remained under intense pressure to prevent any further communal outbreak.

The Hindus killed on the train on Wednesday had been returning from the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state, where thousands have been gathering in defiance of court orders to build a temple on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque razed in December 1992 by Hindu zealots.

The simmering religious dispute has long threatened to boil over into sectarian violence and the Hindu activists in Ayodhya are threatening to start their temple construction on March 15, even it means a confrontation with the security forces.

Vajpayee has held a series of meeting with the leaders of right-wing Hindu organizations in recent days, in a desperate attempt to persuade them to drop, or at least postpone their plans in the interests of communal harmony.

The radical Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP - World Hindu Council), which is spearheading the temple construction campaign, has indicated it might consider some sort of delay, but a face-saving compromise will prove difficult to broker.

A police source said that a large crowd tried to set fire to a Muslim settlement in Sabarkantha district, and three people were stabbed to death in the neighboring Banashkantha district, BBC's online service reported.

"It is now turning into a low grade communal fever that could run for weeks," the officer said. But on the streets, some Hindus shunned the call for peace. Graffiti on a wall on the outskirts of Ahmedabad read: "Learn from us how to burn Muslims."