Politics at play
The HinduIt took more than three months after the Supreme Court declared the bar on women in the 10-50 age group at the Sabarimala temple as unconstitutional for two young women to finally get into the shrine, during the night of the New Year, with their faces covered and with the support of specially tasked policemen in plain clothes. The temple entry of the two women came amid a violent agitation by the Bharatiya Janata Party and affiliated groups on the one hand and protests by the opposition United Democratic Front led by the Congress on the other against what they described as “the way the State government set about hurriedly to implement the Supreme Court verdict”. A number of such “namajapa yatras” were organised by the Sabarimala Protection Council led by the Pandalam Palace Committee with the support of dominant caste organisations such as the Nair Service Society, which was the first to come out against the entry of women of menstruating age at the temple and the court verdict, before the BJP and allied groups and the UDF declared their support to it. The women’s wall was therefore posed as a categorical statement against the three-month-long protests spearheaded by the BJP and other Sangh Parivar organisations opposing the State government’s attempts to implement the apex court’s verdict. It was almost with suppressed glee that the BJP’s State president, K. Sreedharan Pillai, said at a Yuva Morcha meeting at Kozhikode that the Sabarimala issue offered a “golden opportunity” for the BJP in Kerala and that it was “a puzzle, and they have to think now, on how to solve it”; that the protests at Sabarimala were organised by his party; that Kandararu Rajeevaru had sought his legal advice before announcing in public his decision to close down the temple for purification rituals if any woman of menstruating age entered the temple.