Political parties to blame for Indian temple tinderbox

Prime Minister Modi's party hopes to capitalise on the agitation but the communal calculus is against it.

We live in extraordinary times. On the one hand we have the court of law that indulges in hyperbolic judicial activism, and on the other we have social media that runs amok like a bull released on the ancient streets of Pamplona. More often than not, social media users behave like the superior court where everyone puts on the robes and wigs to pass indiscriminate opinions capable of inciting political and communal hatred.
We also live in extraordinary times when political parties shuffle their opinions on a singular subject like a pack of cards to draw maximum electoral mileage. Gone are the days of ideology and established political stance. When a five-judge constitution bench in India, headed by chief justice Dipak Misra, in its 4:1 verdict on September 28, allowed entry of women in the Sabarimala temple, I supported dissenting judge Indu Malhotra and said the court should not poke its nose into matters of faith.
Most political parties, however, welcomed the verdict as a pathbreaking judgement, which said devotion could not be subject to gender discrimination.
The nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) said unfair traditions should be done away with. In an article written for Janmabhumi, a newspaper promoted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), RSS executive council member R Sanjayan said there is nothing in the verdict that adversely affects Hindu beliefs or dharma. The Indian National Congress wasted no time and tweeted, "We welcome the historic Supreme Court judgement allowing entry of women of all ages into the Sabarimala temple."
The Marxists, championing the cause of social and gender equality, were on cloud nine, with Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan jumping the gun to announce that his government would not file a review petition. The government immediately deployed the state machinery to welcome any influx of women devotees to the forest temple.
The BJP was muted in its reaction but let individual leaders air their viewpoints. The party's state general secretary Sobha Surendran said she respected the judgement as the court pronounced its verdict considering all legal aspects of the issue. Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said the "wonderful" verdict would make Hinduism even more inclusive. The only opposition came from head priest Tantri Kandaru Rajeevaru and Sasikumar Varma of the Valiya Koickal Panthaplavil Palace.
So far so good.
Emerging from the hangover of encomiums, the state units of various national parties sensed the judgement's potential to whip up a political storm against the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government. For the RSS-BJP combine, Sabarimala was no more a gender equality issue. It's the Ayodhya of the South which they hope to convert into votes in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. They distanced themselves from the welcoming statements of their national leaders. Some took a shameless U-turn by disowning their own statements. PS Sreedharan Pillai, state president of the BJP, who distanced himself from Sanjayan's article in Janmabhumi, pledged to unleash a wave of protests. A 2016 post by K Surendran, another state leader of BJP, welcoming women of all ages into Sabaraimala, also disappeared from his Facebook page.
The Congress was also found to be eating its own words. Over the years, the BJP had left a dent on the Congress's traditional Nair community vote bank. Fearing further erosion, party leader Ramesh Chennithala, himself a Nair, organised a one-day protest against the Sabarimala verdict and pledged to stand by the faithful. The party high command, however, restrained the state unit from hitting the streets in protest.
The ongoing hubbub over letting women aged 10 to 50 years into the hill temple is spearheaded by the Sabarimala Samrakshana Samithi, an umbrella organisation of several outfits including the BJP's Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha and Mahila Morcha. The campaign turned ugly at several places with hundreds of women protesters besieging the road leading to the temple. Women journalists and activists trying to enter the temple were heckled and their vehicles smashed. The protesting women argue that that entry to the temple was not a right that they ever asked for, but imposed on the faithful by the court on petitions filed by rationalists. They see it as a conspiracy by non-believers and other religions to destroy the Hindu culture and convert Sabarimala into a tourist centre. They point to a rush of non-Hindu Ayyappa devotees like Rahna Fathima and Mary Sweety to Sabarimala, while majority Hindu women are holding back.
They say the government's eagerness to provide unprecedented protection to Fathima, an activist of the much-hated Bare the Breast and Kiss of Love campaigns, is testament to the LDF government's conspiracy against Hindutva. The LDF, fearing that Fathima could be a BJP plant to malign the government, quickly talked her into dropping her climb to the sanctum sanctorum.
The game is on. The BJP has started its campaign for the 2019 parliamentary elections, this time from the South. And its agenda is writ large in the violent Sabarimala protests: religious polarisation. The Vijayan government has made the job easier for the BJP by rushing to implement the court order, though there's a segment in society that salutes the chief minister for not giving in to the saffron brigade. The BJP-RSS's social media machinery is working overtime to expose Vijayan's double-standard, saying he wasn't so enthusiastic to implement similar verdicts in the case of minimum wages for nurses and land for adivasis (tribals).
The LDF could have saved the situation by simply agreeing to file a review petition in the Supreme Court. But for Vijayan, personal pride is more important than political reasoning, which has cost him dearly in the past.
However, analysts say the BJP's ambition to reap huge political dividends in the melee is misplaced because nearly 50 per cent of the state's population is non-Hindus. Vijayan's steadfast stand against the BJP-Congress bid to communalise the Supreme Court verdict will certainly help him earn the much-needed minority support. Besides, the people of Kerala could easily see through the right-wing's shameless flip-flop and breast-beating within hours after welcoming the verdict. The Sabarimala verdict is a godsend to people to tell the good from a crowd of political chameleons.
suresh@khaleejtimes.com
(Writing on the Wall)