Under cover of darkness, and with the aid of police, two women in their 40s prayed at the Sabarimala temple in Kerala on Wednesday – avoiding thousands of protesters who have stopped others doing so. The day before, a chain of hundreds of thousands of women stretched 620km across the southern state, supporting the right to enter the shrine. Three months after the Indian supreme court’s landmark ruling lifted the bar on their entry, and years after the dispute began, this will not end the matter; violent protests erupted after the visit. The long-running dispute has been sharpened by recent developments, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata party’s fostering of Hindu nationalism and the #MeToo movement.
While many Hindu temples bar women who are menstruating, regarding them as unclean, Sabarimala has historically barred all women between 10 and 50 years old. Supporters of the ban argue that this respects the wishes of the deity enshrined there, Lord Ayyappa, who took an oath of celibacy. But it has been challenged repeatedly.
Religious faith is deeply rooted. Many women have objected to granting women access. The only supreme court judge to dissent on the ruling (the sole woman) argued that a secular polity should not ordinarily interfere with religious practice, even if irrational.
But tradition and religion are not only a matter of beliefs shared by a community; they embody its power relations. Men are most often those who decree the acceptable boundaries of belief and practice, and are frequently swift to reject any challenge as the result of outside interference. The supreme court ruling – the latest of several bold and commendable judgments – makes it clear that it is precisely about the right of Hindus, in this case women, to practise their religion as they believe they should. Women seeking to visit the shrine see not faith but misogyny as the obstacle. They understand that tradition and belief evolve. (Indeed, there are claims that the bar is nowhere near as old as claimed.) Temple entry campaigns have been a powerful part of broader social reform movements; these campaigners have bravely taken on patriarchal norms in a society that has often enforced them through violence and where political leaders have offered little leadership. The relatives of one visitor are reportedly in a safe house.
Conflicting and deeply held beliefs are not quickly reconciled. Yet the supreme court gave politicians an opportunity to advance much-needed social reform. Instead, with elections months away, they have seized upon the issue for nakedly political ends, stoking tensions and bolstering reactionary forces. The leaders of both the BJP and Congress in Kerala have organised protests and attacked Wednesday’s visit, the former ludicrously describing it as “a conspiracy by the atheist rulers to destroy the Hindu temples”. The BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi, supported the supreme court judgment outlawing triple talaq – which allowed Muslim men to instantly end their marriages by saying “divorce” three times – but opposes its Sabarimala ruling: the former is about gender equality, the latter, religious interference, he says. Rahul Gandhi, president of Congress, says that he believes women should be able to enter – but that his party represents the feeling of Keralan devotees.
The supreme court made it clear that supporters of the ban have no monopoly on that description: the women who challenged it are believers too. Its ruling deserves respect from protesters on the ground, but more importantly from the politicians currently seeking to exploit them. So do the women whose rights it has recognised.
