At least 2 dead after police open fire amid raging India protests

At least two people are dead after police opened fire at a demonstration, an official said Thursday, as fresh protests erupted across India against a contentious citizenship law that critics say is anti-Muslim.

The men, aged 23 and 49, "died in police firing during the protests", Qadir Shah, a spokesman for the deputy commissioner of the southern city of Mangalore, told AFP, adding that authorities had imposed a curfew some areas.

Another man taken to the King George's Medical University Trauma Centre in Lucknow in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with a gunshot injury died soon after, a hospital source told AFP. His death has not been confirmed by local police.

Four others were being treated at a hospital in Mangalore "with bullet injuries following the clashes", a district medical officer told AFP.

Shah said police fired their weapons after some 200 demonstrators refused to stop their march. "They marched towards the busiest area of Mangalaru. This led to lathi (big, wooden sticks) charge. Then the tear gas was fired. When the protestors still didn't stop, the police had to open fire after that," he said, using an alternate name for the city.

Security forces and protesters had clashed in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka states, while elsewhere police bundled demonstrators onto buses, shuttered Delhi metro stations and cut cellphone access in some areas. The protests were sparked by a new law easing citizenship rules for people fleeing persecution from three neighbouring countries but not Muslims, stoking accusations at home and abroad that Modi wants to reshape India as a Hindu nation, which he denies.

Seven months after Modi swept to a second term, the past week has seen six people killed, dozens injured and on Thursday, authorities banned gatherings across swathes of the world's biggest democracy that together are home to hundreds of millions of people.

Fresh violence erupted in Samhbal, Uttar Pradesh, where hundreds of protesters set fire to vehicles and threw stones at security forces who responded with tear gas, local police chief Yamuna Prasad told AFP.