No place for women: Sabarimala a blot on Kerala’s progressive state status

The Sabarimala protests are a blot on the progressive state whose highest literacy has not translated to good education

Business Standard: From the time I can remember my grandmother, only one image of her comes to my mind – of a widow with a tonsured head, wrapped on top by a dull brown cotton saree worn in traditional style, a blank forehead without the usual red vermilion or ‘kumkum’, bare neck, empty ears and hands unadorned and shorn off all jewellery. Her ankles and feet were bare too – without the traditional anklets or silver rings worn on the toes of both feet – the symbol of married women.

A very vivid story of my grandmother is etched in my memory. I had gone to Melkote, the idyllic temple town near Mysore – where she lived with one of her sons, my maternal uncle – during my school summer holidays from Gorur, where I studied in the local government Kannada medium school.

In those days, a favourite vacation was being taken to your mother’s birth place to be with your grandmother, carefree and pampered. I must have been eight or nine. My older sister was by my side. I’m not sure what triggered this poignant episode that my grandmother recounted, but it was heart rending. Her eyes had welled up in tears, and with dreamy eyes into her distant past she narrated this event.

She was married off as a child-bride of 13 to a boy – also young, just 16 – who was studying to be a Sanskrit pundit and training to become a purohit (priest) in Melkote, a Srivaishnavite pilgrim centre founded by Ramanuja a thousand years ago. When she was in her late thirties her husband took ill and died. She had three children – two boys and a girl, my mother. They were all in their teens and in school.|Read Source: BS

Prohibitory orders in Sabarimala temple extended till December 22

A string of protests has been witnessed in the state after the Supreme Court’s verdict allowing women of all age groups to enter the Lord Ayappa shrine

Pathanamthitta Magistrate Court has extended the prohibitory orders in Sabarimala Temple till the midnight of December 22. The decision has been taken based on reports by the District Police Chief and Executive magistrates in Pamba and Sannidhanam.

Prohibitory orders issued under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC)prohibits assembly of more than four people in an area. The restriction is enforced when there are safety concerns.

A string of protests has been witnessed in the state after the Supreme Court’s verdict allowing women of all age groups to enter the Lord Ayappa shrine. Earlier on Tuesday, a group of 30 women aged between 10 and 50 years has sought permission from the Kerala chief minister to visit Sabarimala temple on December 23.(Click Here: Business Standard OR BS)

The women delegation said they had sent a letter to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan seeking permission and security while visiting the temple, and have been told that their request has been forwarded to concerned police personnel. Till this time, no women in the 10-50 age group has succeeded in offering prayers at the shrine as various people have been protesting against the court’s decision.

Sabarimala: Ban on women fails four key tests of constitutional morality

Excluding menstruating women from the shrine also violates Article 17 — the Constitutional provision prohibiting untouchability

Nearly a century ago, the princely state of Travancore was convulsing with the question of entry of lower castes into the temple at Vaikom. As holy a sage as Sree Narayana Guru, the saint of the Ezhavas, had been  |BS| prevented from using the roads around the Vaikom Shiva temple. Upon the request of some citizens of Travancore, Mahatma Gandhi had sent Congress workers, including EV Ramaswami Naicker (Periyar), to help in the Satyagraha, demanding equal entry to the temple.

The Maharaja of Travancore at the time was Shri Chitra Thirunal – then 12 years old. His step-mother and regent, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi opposed equal temple entry. President K R Narayanan was to later recount, “During the Vaikom Sathyagraha, Mahatma Gandhi visited Kerala. At that time, Sree Chithira Thirunal was a young man, and had not ascended the throne. Gandhiji asked, ‘When you attain majority and when you assume full authority, will you allow Harijans to enter the temple?’ The twelve-year-old Maharajah said without hesitation: ‘Certainly’. This was not the result of anybody’s advice. This arose from his own mind; from his own thinking.”| Sabarimala Verdict

In 1936, aided by his Diwan Sir C P Ramaswami Aiyer, the Maharaja opened temples to all Hindus. The neighbouring Maharaja of Cochin, in response, declared all people from Travancore as untouchables, but temple entry for all in Travancore became a fact.

Religion and our Founding Fathers

The father of India’s Constitution, Dr B R Ambedkar himself had engineered a number of ‘Dalit temple entry movements’ in colonial India. “The issue is not entry, but equality,” Ambedkar has famously said. The question of religion was a vexed one in the Constituent Assembly. There was sharp disagreement on whether the right to religion would include a limited right of ‘religious worship’ or a more expansive right of ‘religious practice’.| Business Standard

An unholy mess: How BJP is using Sabarimala issue to make inroads in Kerala

The protests against Sabarimala verdict have exposed the ingrained obscurantism beneath the veneer of a progressive society and the cynical politics of religion that is at play

Latest News : Kerala is under siege like never before in its volatile history. As the state struggles to get back on its feet after the worst floods in a century, it is convulsed in a violent religious campaign that belongs to another time and place. For the saffron brigade, the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the entry of women of all ages into the hilltop temple of Ayyappan in Sabarimala has come as a godsend, the perfect handle to reignite the regressive religious campaign that the RSS-BJP cohort has been pushing for decades in the last Left bastion in the country.| Sabrimala Temple 

In just three weeks after the SC judgement, Kerala has been reduced to a violent, seething mass of agitators seeking to preserve the status quo at a forest-bound temple that debars women between 10 and 50 years from entering its precincts. From Pandalam, seat of the erstwhile royal family which claims a kinship with the deity, to Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, thousands of protesting women, organised by the hydra-headed RSS and various Hindu outfits, have been swarming across the state demanding that the CPM-led Left Democratic Front government file a review petition in the Supreme Court and also issue an ordinance to stop women of the restricted age group from going to Sabarimala. The protests have exposed the ingrained obscurantism beneath the veneer of a progressive society and the cynical politics of religion that is at play.

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