Kerala has always had the distinction of being India’s most progressive state – with its longstanding CPI(M)-led government working hard to attain equality for all its residents across gender, caste and class lines, and an active electorate fearless in expressing their opinions.
Nothing proves this better than the inspiring show of resistance on Tuesday, when lakhs of women came together – shoulder to shoulder, building a “human wall” cross the national highways in Kerala – to uphold gender equality. Starting from Kerala’s northern tip of Kasaragod to its southern point in Thiruvanthapuram, the “Women’s wall” spanned over 620km and was sponsored in part by the government. Almost 50 lakh women from all walks of life – writers, athletes, actors, politicians, government workers, homemakers; young and old – stood together for nearly an hour. Thousands of men also stood in solidarity, forming a parallel human wall.
This “Women’s wall” was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It’s part of a much longer, deeper fight for women’s equality that found itself in the national spotlight after the Supreme Court allowed women of all ages to enter the Sabarimala temple.
Since 1991, a Kerala high-court judgment had permitted restricting women of menstruating age to enter or pray at the temple out of “respect to the celibate nature of the deity in it.” In September, the Supreme Court overturned that verdict, ruling it unconstitutional and discriminatory. However, despite being made legal, several women who tried to enter Sabarimala were physically assaulted, threatened and ultimately denied entry by staunch devotees. It was only yesterday – after the success of the “wall” – that two women were finally able to enter Sabarimala since the SC verdict. Reportedly, they entered the shrine from a discrete entrance around 3:30am and met with no protest from other devotees present at the time. The temple, however, held “purification rituals” after they left, before opening the doors to other devotees. This is far from the equitable practice imagined by the state’s progressives, but it is the first, small step in taking on a centuries-old social system.
While the “Women’s wall” didn’t explicitly cite tensions at Sabarimala as one of the reasons for its formation, the movement’s overall goals cast a wide net for much-needed change. Featuring a number of firebrand women like communist leader (and 100-year-old) K.R. Gowriamma, as well as women from Christian and Muslim communities, CPI(M) polit bureau member Brinda Karat said “the women of Kerala have scripted history by erecting [this] human wall of resistance.”
Some participants of the “Women’s wall” were reportedly attacked by BJP-RSS workers, who hurled stones at them as well as the police personnel escorting them. Members of the BJP leadership in Kerala called the wall a “total failure and a waste of government funds and machinery.” Karat also called them out fearlessly, stating that the BJP uses women for “its toxic, divisive anti-women political goal,” urging women to resist joining their ranks or acquiescing to their ideologies.
In a country plagued by archaic patriarchal structures and severe religious strife, this “Women’s wall” was a historic moment in the fight towards equality – marking it as one of the largest mass movements of Indian feminists, unprecedented in the history of Independent India. It is a radical push towards challenging the so-called “sacred” traditions that have been used for time immemorial as a justification for the violent discrimination of sexual and gender minorities.
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