Thousands of Indian Leftists Riot Against Trade Accord : Protest: Vastly outnumbered police fire tear gas and water cannons. Clashes last more than three hours.

Thousands of Indian leftists protesting a world trade accord fought pitched battles with police Tuesday near the usually placid site where Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s apostle of nonviolence, was cremated.

Police, said by their superiors to number only 1,500, fired tear gas and water cannons and charged with metal-tipped sticks to keep the demonstrators, who estimated their ranks at 200,000, from reaching the Parliament.

Almost 200 protesters and police, including senior officers, were reported injured in the fracas linked to the largest protest in India’s capital to date against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the global trade pact some Indians claim will allow outsiders to take over their country’s economy.

The clashes lasted for more than three hours near Rajghat, where the body of Gandhi--the spiritual father of Indian independence revered as the Mahatma, or “Great Soul”--was incinerated according to Hindu ritual after his assassination in 1948.

Eyewitnesses estimated that police used more than 1,000 tear gas shells, while protesters fought with stones and iron rods.

The marchers, assembled by India’s two Communist parties and affiliated labor, youth, farmers and women’s groups, demanded that Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s government reject the GATT accord. India and 116 other member countries of GATT, including the United States, are scheduled to sign the new world trade treaty April 15.

Opponents of the accord, mindful of India’s long history as a British colony, fear that local industry will be snapped up or driven out of business by predatory foreign companies as the treaty forces the lifting of protectionist legislation. The farmers lobby is opposed out of concerns that GATT’s patent-protection provisions will mean higher prices for hybrid seeds.

To carry their message to the country’s lawmakers, the protesters tried to break through steel barriers that police erected to block their route from the sprawling Red Fort in Old Delhi, where India’s independence was proclaimed in 1947, to Parliament House.

When a group of about 10,000 young demonstrators succeeded in piercing one of the three police barricades, witnesses said, mounted officers waving short staves charged into the crowd. Several times, the protesters succeeded in pushing police back.

Demonstrators accused police of brutality, but officials said they resorted to force only when the protesters turned violent.

“We have used tear gas canisters and a little bit of caning. There has been no firing,” Delhi Police Chief Mukund Behari Kaushal told the Reuters news agency.

The melee left the Ring Road, a major artery around India’s capital, littered with shoes, broken eyeglasses, red flags and placards denouncing the government for accepting GATT.

The clashes were yet more evidence that Rao’s government has done a poor job of making the case for the agreement to India’s rank-and-file citizenry. India, now in the throes of scrapping much of its socialist economic machinery in favor of a freer market, has said it will sign GATT because it opens up more foreign countries for Indian exports.

The scrapping of quotas for textile imports that now prevail in most developed countries will mean a bigger market for Indian clothing, pro-government economists argue, while the scrapping of their subsidies for agriculture will make India’s rice, cotton, sugar, wheat and other farm products much more competitive.

Rao’s centrist Congress-I Party has prepared a booklet explaining its stand on GATT, but meanwhile, opponents have utilized street theater, protests and walkouts in Parliament to get their message across.