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 lesson 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 transgender could make 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! (IPA Service)
The post 40 To Do An Alamo On Sabarimala appeared first on Newspack by India Press Agency.
