By Aditya Aamir
Imagine 4 crore people on the edge of the seat. A prayer on their lips. Malayalis! On five continents with most of them concentrated on a sliver of land, Kerala. Four crore mortals and an increasingly vulnerable deity, the celibate Swami Ayyappa, waiting for Justice – maybe more powerful than all of them put together – to pronounce judgement, whether God should live as a whole as before or stand curtailed in existence.
Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, in all fairness to the fair and dark, let them stew in their own uncertainties. Right to pray arrayed against the ready to wait. Two strains of humankind. One set, married to tradition; the other set, divorced to anything that will hold back ‘Navothhanam’ – progressives who cannot wait to break mould and custom to cut to size the male of the species, asking, “Who is this god who stands in our way?
How would have ‘Wise King Solomon’ heard this case? That is a question which will not strike many. For Solomon himself is dated, outdated, somebody from the hoary past. A myth, maybe, who knows? And the trend is to cast away the old and embrace the new. Yesterday stinks, today is the aftershave! Time moves ahead, in one direction. But in his and her haste, there is also the man and woman who is prone to throw the baby away with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking.
“What sort of man is new CJI Ranjan Gogoi?” many a Malayali was wondering Tuesday morning. “Is he the sort who throws the baby away with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking?” Will he reject? Order a stay? A fresh hearing of the four new writ petitions? Justice Gogoi did not take long to reveal his mind, refusing to hear the “four writs” in open court, much to the chagrin and disappointment of senior Supreme Court counsel to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Aryaman Sundaram, who sought an open court hearing. Attorney General K K Venugopal quipped, “People travel thousands of miles to the shrine, and he refused!”
But, hey, said many in Kerala, take heart, this does not mean what you think. “Trust me, if the CJI says the court will take up for hearing the 49 review petitions first. That means there is hope,” one Malayali “expert”, who chose articles 14 and 26 to lay out his brief, said. “People, I see a silver lining. Article 26 read with article 14 shows clearly that there is error on the face of law.”
According to him and his happy ilk, when the Constitution bench takes up the batch of 49 review petitions in the CJI’s Chambers, the “error on the face of the law” will jump up in stark relief and it will become apparent to CJI Ranjan Gogoi and the three other justices – Justices Chandrachud, Indu Malhotra, Khanvilkar and Rohington Nariman – who penned the majority jugdement on September 28 that justice was denied to the millions of “true devotees” of Swami Ayyappa.
But there are those who, like gender-justice warrior Trupti Desai, want the September 28 ruling to prevail. “There are lakhs of us who want to go to Sabarimala, I will be there next week and we want the court to do justice to us by upholding the September 28 judgement,” Desai said, noting that she was worried about the law and order situation. She should be, because the Ayyappa-fever in Kerala is burning bright like the ferocious tiger Ayyappan rides!
The BJP and the RSS, indeed the entire Sangh Parivar, are on the streets, leading marches and generally giving a headache to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who is refusing to buckle under pressure though the Travancore Devaswom Board says it has called an all-stakeholders meet to sort out the rough edges even as the police secures Sabarimala tighter than an open and shut case for the Mandala Puja next week when the shrine reopens again.
Problem is if the Supreme Court sticks to Constitution bench’s September 28 ruling, Ayyappa devotees will not be getting out of Trupti Desai’s way today, tomorrow or the day after! Earlier, on Monday, a case of contempt against state BJP chief Sreedharan Pillai was not allowed by Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, giving another dose of hope to the devotees that life did not look that bad for Swami Ayyappa.
The question, however, is who is Ayyappa devotee, Trupti Desai or the 25-year-old Kerala housewife who is ready to wait till she’s 50 and more? Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan says any woman of whatever age who wants to go to Sabarimala is a devotee, but Ayyappa activist Rahul Easwar articulates that the woman who refuses to adhere to age-old temple Ayyappa traditions cannot be a devotee, period! The irony is CJI Ranjan Gogoi and his bench will have the last word; and, even then, not the final say! (IPA Service)
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