Kerala Turns Into A War Zone

The Supreme Court will hear on January 22 a contempt plea against the Sabarimala temple Tantri for shutting the sanctum for purification after two women belonging to the previously prohibited age group entered the temple on January 2.

Declining the plea for an early hearing of the latest contempt plea, the bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said: We have kept the date as January 22. We have arranged our schedules for that. Will hear then. Even as the SC denied an early hearing, armed with stones and crude bombs, mobs took to the streets in Kerala during the dawn-to-dusk strike on Thursday, clashing with the police, forcing shops to shut and attacking offices of the ruling CPM and its allies in several districts.

By evening, more than 30 police personnel were injured and nearly 750 people were arrested. The strike was called by groups protesting against the entry of the two young women in the Sabarimala temple, defying its traditional ban on women of reproductive age.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan hit out at the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, accusing them of instigating violence and calling strikes against the constitutional rights of women. “The women were not airdropped. They went through the normal route.

They were even helped by other devotees,” he said. The right-wing groups, he said, were trying to turn the state “into a war zone”. In the evening, Kerala Governor P Sathasivam sought a report from the Chief Minister on the incidents of violence and destruction of private and public property.
Inputs from NDTV and Freepressjournal