How religion and women's rights clash at Sabarimala: NYT journo's story

'In India, the people's belief is more important than any law,' said Devidas Sethumadhavan, a district officer in Kerala for the RSS.

Business Standard : As a woman and a man climbed a steep trail on Thursday leading to one of Hinduism’s holiest temples, a mob multiplied with frightening speed.

From a point farther up the path, several hundred men screamed at the woman, insisting that she immediately turn back from visiting the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old shrine in southern India. When the pair of visitors, both journalists for The New York Times, decided to descend, the crowd rushed at them, hurled rocks and pummeled two dozen police officers.

“Madam, you don’t be afraid, O.K.?” Habeeb Ullah, one of the police officers, told one of the journalists, a bit too late.

For centuries, women of childbearing age were prohibited from entering the temple, which is perched on a lush hill in the coastal state of Kerala. Last month, after India’s Supreme Court struck down that ban, saying that barring women from the temple infringed on their constitutional rights, thousands of protesters pledged that women who dared to visit the temple would be punished.

On Wednesday, when the temple opened for the first time since the ban was scrapped, it quickly became the latest battleground in a long-running conflict between India’s modern, liberal court system and deeply conservative elements of its ancient culture. Protesters, many of them women, assaulted several journalists, smashed vehicle windshields and tried to rip a 22-year-old woman who planned to visit the temple from a bus

“Hooliganism reigns in this place,” the woman’s father, Manoj, who goes by one name, told the Indian news media. “It’s almost as if these people view women as terrorists.”

By late Wednesday, the Kerala government had deployed hundreds of heavily armed police officers near a river bed at the base of the trek, and dozens of people had been arrested. Manoj Abraham, a police officer in the area, said, “Every devotee will be allowed safe passage.”

But the dispute is about something much broader than access to a temple: Whether Supreme Court rules can be enforced in a spectacularly diverse country of 1.3 billion people, where progressive court orders issued in New Delhi are abstract, or optional, in rural parts of India, and communities are intensely organized around religion.

Though Indian women are leading campaigns to dismantle discriminatory rules on access to religious sites, and courts are ruling in their favor, the grip of tradition is still ironclad in places like the Sabarimala Temple.

“In India, the people’s belief is more important than any law,” said Devidas Sethumadhavan, a district officer in Kerala for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group.

For as long as anybody can remember, caretakers at the Sabarimala Temple, which hosts millions of pilgrims every year, have obediently enforced a de facto ban on women and girls who menstruate, defined by temple officials as those between 10 and 50 years old. The restrictions are rooted in the belief that the presence of menstruating women, who some Hindus believe are impure, would distract Lord Ayyappa, the deity the shrine is dedicated to, because he is celibate.... Read More