Pathanamthitta: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may scoop up at least three of Kerala’s 20 seats on the back of its support for the Sabarimala agitation, P.S. Sasikumar Varma, a member of the state’s powerful Pandalam royal family, has said.
In an exclusive interview to ThePrint, Varma also said that Pinarayi Vijayan will be the last Left Chief Minister of Kerala.
Kerala erupted in widespread protests, include stone pelting, after the Supreme Court, in September last year, allowed women of the menstruating age (between 10 and 50 years) entry into the sanctum sanctorum of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala temple in the Pathanamthitta district.
The ruling overturned a decades-old bar rooted in Ayyappa’s celibacy, and devotees took to the streets in protest.
Of the state’s political players, the BJP had been a vocal opponent of pleas to overturn the bar since the beginning of the campaign by women’s rights activists. The Congress joined the protests in the aftermath of the Supreme Court order, while the Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) tried to implement the court directive, much to the irritation of locals.
The Pandalam royals, who claim that a human incarnation of Ayyappa was born into their family back in the day, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the protesters.
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‘Vijayan last LDF CM of Kerala’
The BJP has been using the Sabarimala issue as a poll plank in the Pathanamthitta, Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha (currently held by the Congress) and Thrissur (Communist Party of India) constituencies, the hotbed of the agitation. The party has never won a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala, though it is said to have made some inroads in the state, where it won its first ever assembly seat in 2016.
The Pandalam royal family has decided not to openly campaign for the BJP, but they feel there could certainly be a 15 to 20 per cent shift in vote share towards the party and its allies in Kerala.
Varma, the president of the Pandalam managing committee, which manages the palace and the palace trust, feels that the breach of the temple’s sanctity will trigger a severe backlash.
“Pinarayi Vijayan will be the last LDF Chief Minister of Kerala,” Varma said.
According to Varma, local voters, who have traditionally opted for the LDF or the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), will go with the BJP this time.
“There will be a change in the minds of people, especially pilgrims. There will be a marginal increase in the percentage of votes for the NDA this year, and there is every chance that two to three NDA candidates will be elected from Kerala,” he said.
“They can go to Parliament from here as a lot of people who were not in the political arena have joined them (BJP)… and the majority of God-loving people in the LDF will most probably vote for the NDA and those who supported the devotees of Ayyappa,” Varma added.
According to the royal family, the Sabarimala undercurrent is so strong that it will have a “cascading effect” in every constituency of Kerala.
Alleging that the Left parties used the Supreme Court’s Sabarimala order as an opportunity to “propagate their atheist ideology among the people of Kerala”, Varma said the present state government was “basically against God”.
‘Cleansing ritual’
Soon after Kerala Chief Minister Vijayan announced this January that two middle-aged women, Bindu and Kanakadurga, had managed to enter the Sabarimala temple, the Pandalam Palace Trust wrote to the Travancore Devasom Board, which manages the shrine, and asked them to perform a purification ritual.
The royal family also said that if the temple ritual disallowing women of menstruating age is broken, the devotees would be cursed.
THis royal family member pontificates as if he is the only one who can pronounce on Sabarimala and the SC counts for nothing. He’s unaware of the fact that the LDF in recent local elections did pretty well in his own backyard.
His threats that the devotees will be cursed is atypical medieval trick used by the priestly class centuries ago.
#SmashBrahmanicalPatriarchy
This issue showed me the true character of BJP… If they really wanted to resolve the issue and support the Hindus… They could have passed an ordinance…. But they don’t do that, they continue to create confusion on ground and protests on ground and did nothing but laughed at the state from the top…
And now they are making donkeys out the most literate state by making them vote citing support against a party that didn’t even have 10% seats in the parliament…