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NEW DELHI, Feb 28 (AFP) - Hardline Hindu MPs briefly delayed the presentation of the annual budget in the Indian parliament on Thursday, demanding a statement from the government on the train attack in Gujarat state that left 58 people dead, most of them Hindu activists.

No sooner had parliament convened for the day, then legislators from the right-wing Shiv Sena and hardline members of the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party rushed the well of the lower house, shouting slogans.

After appeals for calm from, among others, the government's hawkish Home Minister L.K. Advani, the MPs returned to their seats and allowed Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha to begin his budget speech.

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

According to police and eyewitnesses several thousand Muslims had surrounded the train just outside Godhra town, attacking the passengers with stones and other weapons and then pouring kerosene over the carriages and setting them on fire. 

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