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By Terry Friel

AHMEDABAD, India, Dec 12 (Reuters) - India's Gujarat state, racked this year by some of the country's worst religious bloodshed, chooses a new government on Thursday in a tight and bitter battle that will chart the course of national politics.

Hundreds of people have been detained to prevent trouble, almost 60,000 bound over, and 100,000 state police and federal paramilitary forces deployed across the vast state, where half the 36,000 polling booths are deemed potentially dangerous.

The election is a showdown between the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also leads the federal coalition government, and the country's main opposition Congress party.

Opinion polls vary wildly, but most show the BJP -- accused of fanning, or at least failing to stop, the violence -- just in front in a race for the 182-seat assembly in India's second most industrialised state. The election is seen as a test of of the BJP's hardline Hinduism.

Officials say at least 1,000 people died in the Hindu-Muslim violence nine months ago. Rights groups say the toll was more than 2,500, mostly Muslims, including children, hacked to death or burned alive.

But the campaign has so far been remarkably peaceful, with not a single death in a nation where elections are almost always marred by fatal clashes between rival parties.

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Youths stoned a car carrying a Congress minister from the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh on Wednesday, but police said there were no injuries.

After weeks of campaigning and uncertain polls, it is still unclear if the communal violence will stoke deep and emotional religious divisions or shock Gujaratis into a show of unity.

"The BJP is good for Hindus because Congress is siding with the Muslims," tobacco farmer Dilip Patel told Reuters in the bustling, dusty farming town of Sanant, just outside the state commercial capital of Ahmedabad.

"It's their (Muslims') fault -- they started it!" yelled a bystander, cheered by a small crowd of onlookers.

But 29-year-old Muslim tailor Naseruddin Qutbuddin Ansari, whose soot-stained face, wide-eyed with terror, was photographed by Reuters and became the defining image of the horror, was confident Hindus and Muslims would unite to oust the state BJP.

"Muslims have suffered a lot and even ordinary Hindus don't want any more riots," he said, taking a break from hand-sewing shirts for 23 rupees (48 cents) each in a Muslim enclave in Ahmedabad.

Analysts see the poll as a test of the electoral popularity of a Hindu revivalist platform which outgoing BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi has made the main plank of his campaign.

A decisive win would be a vote of confidence in his policy and would tempt the BJP to shift to the right elsewhere after a string of state electoral reversals that has left Gujarat as the only state where it has sole control.

Defeat would undermine the BJP within the unwieldy national coalition and ultimately could lead to early national elections, currently not due until 2004.

Modi has denied allegations of complicity in the reprisal killings of Muslims, which began after 59 Hindus were burned to death on a train in the town of Godhra on February 27.

But he nonetheless referred repeatedly to the Hindu deaths in Godhra during his election speeches in what has been one of the most vitriolic campaigns in India's history.

Voting begins at 8 a.m. (0230 GMT) and ends at 5 p.m. Counting begins on Sunday and a result is due that night.

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