"Gandhi's memorial will be sullied when he touches it. So after he goes away, we will clean it with water from the Ganges river," said Shiv Sena leader Jai Bhagwan Goel.

Musharraf, reviled by many as the architect of a bloody conflict at Kargil, is due to visit the Gandhi memorial on the banks of the Yamuna river in New Delhi on Saturday.

The next day he travels to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal monument to love, for talks with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

"We believe that Musharraf has the blood of Kargil martyrs on his hand," Goel said. Goel added that activists of his party would chant hymns from Hindu scriptures as they cleaned the memorial's black marble slab with water from the holy river Ganges and the urine of a cow, an animal sacred to Hindus.