The mega-mass event will go down in India's contemporary history as a blow on the behalf of reason.
As
per reports, two dedicated women of menstrual age – dedicated both
to Lord
Ayappa and the constitution of India – have succeeded in
breaking the irrational taboo at Sabarimala by entering the sanctum
sanctorum and offering their prayers to the deity.
Coming
after the entry at Haji Ali Dargah, Shani Shingnapur and the
delegitimisation of the practice of instant triple talaq, the
breakthrough at Sabarimala
crowns a year of concerted mass determination to obtain gender
justice in the cultural-religious domain long granted by India’s
constitutional democracy.
The
hiatus between the determinations of the Supreme Court on behalf of
the rights granted to “we the people” and their lawful and
mandatory implementation by state institutions thus continues to be
bridged, however contentedly.
The
imbroglio at Sabarimala underscores a new and pathbreaking maturity
of governance by the state. It has long been a theoretical infirmity
of the Left to assume that any rational idea must necessarily find
instant compliance among the people at large. And should it be
resisted, the state should deem itself authorised to resort to a
coercive implementation of democratic requirements.
Such
insistence, of course, ignores that great Marxist insight which had
spoken of the “objective constraints of history” and cautioned
that although “men make their own history,” they cannot make it
any which way they like. Often, laudable pursuits of equity have thus
been vitiated by an unripe refusal to attend to the power of previous
social ideas and formations, and by the inability to deal with them
with full and patient intelligence.
The
Pinarayi Vijayan government has thus shown a new and perspicacious
way; it has steadfastly refused to succumb to the bait set for it by
the violence and resistance of reactionary social forces. Learning a
lesson from Nandigram, the Kerala government came to adopt a humane
and constitutionally upright two-fold tactic: one, to make it known
in no uncertain terms that it meant to adhere to the constitutional
imperative laid down by the highest court in the land, and, two, that
it would not do so by taking recourse to forceful means.
The
attempts by the Kerala
police apparatus to enable devotees of menstrual age to enter the
shrine have been credible, even if unsuccessful till today. So has
been their resolve not to push back the unprepared resistance by
crude strong-arm methods. We can be sure that in the long term, this
new tactical brilliance on behalf of the governing Left will
reinforce and enhance the practice of lawful and democratic
governance in other states as well.
