Former chief minister Oommen Chandy said the UDF had a clear road map, complete with a start and an end, to solve the Sabarimala crisis. “The start was the affidavit we had submitted before the Supreme Court, replacing the one already given by the Achuthanandan government,” Chandy said in a exclusive chat with Onmanorama. “The end part is to go for legislation if the Supreme Court verdict offers no solution,” he said.
Chandy said Congress was the only party that did not use the Sabarimala issue to play politics. “Has anyone known that we had submitted such an affidavit,” he asked. “The Congress's stand on the issue was not cooked up after the Sabarimala verdict was pronounced either,” he said, an indirect reference to the BJP's sudden U-turn on the issue. “Ours was put forth long before, and articulated through our affidavit,” he said and added: “Justice Indu Malhothra's judgment reflects our affidavit. She too had invoked Article 26.”
Chandy said Article 26 was a protective clause that Indian Constitution bestows on the faithful. “It allows religious denominations to introduce certain reasonable restrictions on the basis of their unique customs and practices. This is what our affidavit had said,” he said.
He brushed aside the perception that the Congress had become irrelevant in Sabarimala. “On the one hand, the Marxist party was using the government machinery to forcibly pull out activists from their homes and take them to Sabarimala. We did no such thing. We also did not unleash violence in Sabarimala the way the BJP had,” he said. Only the UDF had a clear vision, he said.
When asked whether the Congress faced the ignominy of being called the B-team of the BJP in the Sabarimala issue, he shot back. “Who was it that corrected and replaced the affidavit? Was it done at the behest of the BJP?”
Chandy said that if the UDF were in power, it would have arrived at a solution that protected customs and rituals without triggering any unseemly controversies. “Neither will we instigate trouble in Sabarimala nor will we hold up grand ideas like renaissance and in the guise of it carry out the party's agenda. We will wait for the verdict. If it is not favourable, we will go in for discussions. If this too fails, then legislation,” he said.
Chandy clarified that legislation was not against women. “It is not to destroy gender equality but to protect the right of a citizen to follow his belief. Our country's most profound strength is that each of its citizens can hold on to his or her faith. Those who have no faith can hold on to that also,” he said.
Chandy said that it were the women who were in the forefront of the agitation against the verdict. “It was not organised by anyone. The women came out on their own,” he said. He also wanted to know how many women had shown their willingness to go to Sabarimala even after the government pressed into service its entire official machinery. “There were only a handful of them,” he said.
He also wanted the BJP's double standards to be exposed. “Is the BJP ready for a legislation to solve the issue,” he asked. As for the government, he said the verdict was brought upon the state. He said chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan handled the issue in haste. “Customs and rituals should be protected. The chief minister may ask whether the court verdict shouldn't be implemented. It has to be. But the truth is, the chief minister had just a single-point agenda of implementing the verdict,” Chandy said. “He could have gone for a review, or he could have asked for more time to implement the verdict,” Chandy said.
