UNS/AFP :Varanasi, where Hindus travel to cremate their dead by the Ganges river, is the latest flashpoint in a running battle to claim centuries-old Islamic monuments for the country’s majority faith.
Campaigners have found an ideological patron in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who last month inaugurated a grand new temple on the site of a mosque notoriously demolished by Hindu zealots decades earlier.
“We are witnessing repression and cruelty,” Yaseen, 78, told AFP.
“This is not just the issue of one mosque. Their slogan says that … ‘not even one tomb or mosque will be spared.’”
Yaseen is joint secretary of the Gyanvapi mosque, one of the largest Muslim congregations in the heart of Varanasi.
Hindus in the city have long maintained that the structure was built over a shrine to the Hindu deity Shiva during the Mughal empire that ruled over much of India centuries ago.
Muslim worshippers have been attending the mosque under police guard for years to prevent the simmering dispute from boiling over.
But this week marked a major escalation with a local court ordering the mosque’s basement thrown open to Hindu worshippers within seven days of its ruling.
A Hindu prayer ceremony was held there the following morning and India’s top court has refused to hear a request by Muslim petitioners to invalidate the order.
Yaseen said the ruling and subsequent rush of worshippers to the site, unimpeded by authorities, had demonstrated official backing for the Hindu claim, leaving him deeply distressed.
