NEW DELHI: Now that Sabarimala is more or less peaceful and the Mandala puja period coming to an end this week, the focus will be on Supreme Court, which is scheduled to take up a host of writ petitions against its own judgement of 28 September allowing women of all ages to enter the Ayyappa temple there. The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice R.F. Nariman, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice Indu Malhotra will hear the petitions in open court on 22 January. Fresh pleas related to the temple will be heard only after the Apex Court decided on the earlier petitions seeking review of its 28 September judgement. In September, a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by the then Chief Justice Dipak Mishra had by a 4:1 verdict paved the way for entry of women of all ages into the Sabarimala temple, saying the ban amounted to “gender discrimination”. Ever since, Kerala has been on the edge, with the ruling Left Front government bent on implementing the court order and devotees with the help of Hindu socio-cultural organisations and the BJP-RSS combine resisting it. Since everybody knows that nothing dramatic is going to happen on 22 January—all the more after two or more young women as claimed have entered the shrine—it will now be time for political parties to take stock of their gains from the three-month old game with Ayyappa. While the three major players—CPM, BJP and Congress—will be the ultimate gainers from this sordid drama, sadly the losers will be genuine Ayyappa devotees who still ardently believe that entry of women is against the age-old tradition of the shrine. They are yet to recover from the shock when hooligans took over the streets of Kerala in their name after the entry of two women to the shrine was confirmed in the early hours of 2 January.
Not surprisingly, the BJP hopes to gain the most from its Save Sabarimala campaign, though the agitation has now petered out and the party is eagerly looking forward to 22 January to end its ongoing relay fast in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram. The party may have won the hearts of Ayyappa devotees, but the leadership had during the agitation exposed themselves to the vulnerability of vote bank politics. The one statement by BJP’s current state president, P.S. Sreedharan Pillai that the agitation was a “golden opportunity” for the party to capture power in the state has not gone down well with the devotees. More damage was done when he stated that the party’s agitation in Sabarimala was not against the entry of women, but against the communists. It has to a large extent alienated many Hindu organisations, especially the Nair Service Society, which was the backbone of the protest. If at all the BJP stands to gain electorally, a major share of the vote has to come from this community, which has its say in central Kerala. Traditionally Congress supporters, Nairs of late had veered towards the CPM mainly due to their admiration for the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. But Vijayan has burned bridges during the agitation, especially after it came to light that the government had planned and executed the entry of two young women to the shrine by the backdoor. This is seen as a calculated move by the CPM to “insult Hindus”. While the NSS chief G. Sukumaran Nair has made it clear that it will have no truck with CPM in future, he has not made any commitment towards the BJP. However, the latest announcement of the Central government regarding the reservation for the economically backward among the General Category in government jobs and education is one of the long-standing demands of the NSS. In that way the Nair scale may tilt towards the BJP in the general elections.
Even then to open account in the general elections, the state BJP will have to go a long way. The agitation has also thrown open the divide that still exists within the state leadership. It has come to such a pass that those belonging to the V. Muraleedharan group have refused to cooperate with the current leadership’s agitation at the secretariat. No prominent leader from that group has volunteered to undergo fast. Shunting Muraleeedharan out of Kerala—he is now a Rajya Sabha MP and is in charge of party affairs in Andhra—has not solved the problem. Instead, it has only worsened the power struggle with the state unit. Since BJP has no party structure as such in the state, it is dependent on the RSS cadre for any kind of political initiative. This is the reason why any protest by the BJP ends up in confrontation with the CPM cadre. This has antagonised the party from a large section of sympathetic general public. The RSS in turn is not happy the way BJP central leadership removed its nominee Kummanom Rajasekharan from state president’s post. No wonder there is strong clamour to bring him back to the helm of affairs in the state before the general elections. Interestingly, the Sabarimala Karma Samithi and other Hindu organisations are rooting for Kummanom, who on a recent visit to the state got a rousing welcome from them. Unless the party solves the leadership problem for once and all, it will be difficult for BJP to consolidate its gains from the Sabarimala agitation politically.