Sabarimala season ends, but the political war continues

sabarimala — After witnessing unprecedented protests over the entry of women of menstruating age, the Lord Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala was closed on Sunday marking the culmination of the over two-month-long stormy annual pilgrimage season.

As the temple closed, the opposition BJP ended its 49-day-long relay hunger strike staged in front of the Secretariat, the administrative hub in Thiruvananthapuram, demanding the lifting of prohibitory orders and restrictions at Sabarimala, which the LDF government rejected.

While Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday lashed out at the Sangh Parivar and said their Sabarimala stir was a “complete failure”, BJP state president P S Sreedharan Pillai claimed the agitations were aimed at protecting the traditional faith of devotees and it had won in garnering mass support.

The Sabarimala Karma Samithi, the right-wing forum which spearheaded the agitations against the entry of young women into the shrine, was set to organise a mass

gathering of devotees, spiritual and cultural leaders in the state capital later in the evening.

The sanctum sanctorum of the hill temple was closed at 6.15am after darshan by P Raghava Varma Raja, representative of the erstwhile Pandalam royal family, attached to the centuries-old shrine.

After the customary ‘bhasmabhishekam’,

the portals of the shrine were closed with the singing of Harivarasanam. With this, the tumultuous 67-day long annual pilgrimage season at Sabarimala concluded and the Lord Ayyappa temple would be reopened on February 13 for the monthly poojas in the Malayalam month, Kumbham, sources said.

All the major political parties in

the state including the CPM, Congress and the BJP have indicated that they will try to cash in on the Sabarimala related developments in the upcoming Parliamentary elections.

Addressing a workshop in the state capital on Sunday, the CM said the Sabarimala stir was led by the “advocates of casteism”. —