As Hindus began prayers at a mosque in one of India's holiest cities, the building's elderly custodian Syed Mohammad Yaseen wondered how much longer he would be permitted to worship there.

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........

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