By Sushil Kutty
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the Mexican General who led the siege of the Alamo in the 1830s, got hit by a cannon shell on his ankle, leading to the amputation of a leg, which he ordered buried with full military honours. He seems to be the inspiration of child-bearing women wanting to breach the male bastion of Sabarimala! The Alamo finally fell, but Texas remained with the Americans. There ought to be lessons in that for the barred women but they don’t seem to lack in determined guts a la Santa Anna!
Sunday, some 40 women of a Chennai-based rights group will try to reach Sabarimala in an attempt to break the gender-barrier, their spirits bolstered or wounded by the fact that four transgenders could make it but not women despite Supreme Court go-ahead. Women of child-bearing age – 10-50 years – were being stopped from entering the shrine and that was what a five-judge bench of the apex court overturned on September 28, 2018 by a 4-1 vote, the lone dissenter judge favouring Swami Ayyappa’s vow.
News is that the 40 have Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s backing and they have been in email-contact with him, resulting in the state government giving them an assurance that they will be given full police security to go ahead and try taking a hit for the sake of gender-equality. This, when a modicum of sanity has come to prevail in Sabarimala following at times violent protests and even the great Trupti Desai was not allowed to step out of the Kochi Airport.
The women from the rights group ‘Manithi’ will reach Kottayam Sunday and from there travel to Sabarimala. The Pinarayi government has guaranteed them security but it has to be seen how much of a promise that will be. Recent history shows the Kerala Police has been more interested in seeing that women don’t undertake the last leg of the journey, sitting them down for what looked like counselling sessions of the family court-kind between estranged wives and cheating husbands! Only the most obdurate of women refuse to listen; that has been the experience so far.
The Ayyappa devotees thronging the shrine in the thousands are themselves the biggest barrier to child-bearing age women and security for the celibate Ayyappa. The four transgender who went to the shrine a week ago on the “invitation” of the Chief Tantri faced tense minutes when they were mistaken for women by the male Ayyappa devotees, clad as they were in sari. So much so, police in riot-gear had to give them cover. And because the police were in boots, the Chief Tantri later led a cleansing operation of the shrine.
So, for all the bravado and guaranteed police security, the 40 are most likely to return with vow unfulfilled because the final word has to come from the Chief Tantri who has vowed that one whiff of ‘woman of child-bearing age’ and he will lock the shrine and walk off with the key, to the palace of ex-royalty, which still holds sway in the lost kingdom of Pandalam, of which Sabarimala is part. Pinarayi Vijayan is chief minister of Kerala but his writ doesn’t run in Sabarimala, where a 3-member committee of two High Court judges and a top cop has sole jurisdiction. And the top cop is no friend of Pinarayi!
Pinarayi may play along with such requests from determined barred women but they should know his hands are tied to the extent that he is politician first and gender-equality warrior second. And he has his own agenda, the larger goal of bringing wholesale Navothanna to Kerala, of which bringing Sabarimala to its knees is a major part but not the sole part. He has more important things to do, one of which is to put up the Vanitha Mathil or the Great Wall of Women extending from Kasargode to Thiruvananthapuram on January 1, New Year 2019.
Pinarayi has staked his all, including his tough-man reputation, on building the Vanitha Mathil and he wouldn’t let 40 Tamil women on a wild goose chase to spoil his New Year! In that he will have Tamil MP Pon Radhakrishnan on his side. The Union minister is pissed off that he was halted and harangued by a special cop on his way to Sabarimala. So much so, miffed Pon has slapped a privilege motion against the cop in the Lok Sabha and the cop happens to be a Pinarayi-favourite.
The 40 coming to Sabarimala will enthuse the BJP/RSS, it has been too quiet on the Sabarimala front for them for far too long after the initial rush of adrenaline and opportunities to keep the saffron flying in Commie-Congress land in the hope that devotees will convert to votes in time for GE 2019 to land a couple of MP seats. Following the High Court intervention, it will not be easy but it’s a long distance from Kottayam to Sabarimala and ‘Namajapam’ is like instant coffee and instant Maggi, ready to serve at two minutes’ notice.
Trupti Desai got a sip of the Bru and the 40 might get a Nestle-welcome at Kottayam if not a Maggi spread beyond that. Santa Anna lost a leg at the Alamo; the 40 take the risk of not being able to move even one leg. Most likely, their move will get buried at Kottayam or on the way to Sabarimala and it wouldn’t be with full state honours.