Police clear protesters as Indian temple prepares to accept women

Hindu devotees, many of them female, have protested in recent days against allowing women to pray in the Sabarimala temple.
/AFP

Indian police on Wednesday cleared protesters trying to stop women from accessing one of Hinduism’s most sacred sites, a hilltop temple forced by judges to open its doors to all female pilgrims for the first time.

The Supreme Court in September overturned a ban on women of menstruating age, between 10 and 50, entering and praying at the Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala in the southern state of Kerala.

This enraged traditionalists, including supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with protests by thousands of people ahead of the scheduled opening on Wednesday afternoon.

In recent days groups of chanting women opposed to the court’s decision have stopped vehicles along the route and at Nilackal, the base camp below the temple, preventing other women from proceeding.

But early Wednesday police broke up the protests at Nilackal to allow hundreds of devotees, male and female, to proceed in buses towards the temple. The final seven kilometers will then be made by pilgrims on foot.

“We arrested seven people,” said police chief Manoj Abraham, in charge of 500 officers at Nilackal.

“Anyone who wants to go to the temple will be able to do so without hindrance.”

“Stern action will be taken against anyone who prevents devotees from going to Sabarimala,” Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said on Tuesday.

But traditionalist demonstrators remained defiant, including Biju S. Pillai, a local man in his 30s who said he returned from working in Dubai to “protect the sanctity of the temple” with his mother and young son.

“No one should be able to change the way this temple has functioned for centuries,” he told AFP. “If any change is made they will have to kill us and go over our bodies.”