It was opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala's mention of Hindu Parliament leader C P Sugathan that seems to have provoked Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan the most in the Kerala Assembly on Monday. “Now we hear that C P Sugathan who had blocked women in Sabarimala has been made the organiser of the 'woman's wall'. This is a disgrace,” Chennithala said, in response to the chief minister's charge that the Congress was in cahoots with the BJP-RSS combine.
The chief minister appeared stung, but he did not respond to the 'Sugathan' comment. Sugathan, who is known for his misogynistic statements, was named as one of the organisers of the 'renaissance women's wall' planned on January 1, 2019. Now Sugathan himself has come out in the open to deliver a serious embarrassment to the chief minister. He said that he would step down from the organising committee if the wall was about women's entry into Sabarimala. For the government, the 'women's wall' was clearly a counter to the Namajapa protests marked by the overwhelming presence of women.
VSDP chairman Vishnupuram Chandrasekharan also said 52 organisations will pull out of the event. Karimpuzha Ramachandran, state president of the Brahmana Sabha, has asked the chief minister to remove his name from the organising committee.
Sugathan, who was in Sabarimala to block women from entering, but says he was misled. In a Facebook post, Sugathan said that when his name was included in the organising committee it was clarified that the programme was about renaissance history and had nothing to do with the entry of women into Sabarimala.
On December 1, after the chief minister met with 100-odd Hindu religious leaders, a general council was formed to organise the 'renaissance women's wall' with SNDP general secretary Vellappally Natesan as chairman and KPMS leader Punnala Sreekumar as convener. Nearly 200 Hindu organisations invited for the meeting, but only 176 had accepted the invite, and even among them some like the NSS had stayed away.
Sources said that it was Sugathan's image as a 'Sangh Parivar' hater that goaded the organisers to invite him to the December 1 meeting. The fact is, though he despises the Hindu Aikya Vedi and other Sangh outfits with vengeance, Sugathan had at times advocated a form of communal hatred more vicious than any of the Sangh Parivar outfits.
After the Sugathan gamble backfired, the government has urgently called a second meeting of community and caste leaders on Monday to take stock of the new developments that have cropped up after the December 1 meeting. There were also allegations that the 'women's wall' did not have adequate women's representation. The review meeting on Monday is expected to amp up women's presence in the wall.
It was Congress MLA V T Balram who first raised the Sugathan issue. In a Facebook post he asked: "Why is not a single Communist uttering a word against Pinarayi Vijayan's decision to use crazed bigots like Sugathan to stage a farce renaissance drama."
Sugathan's remarks against Hadiya (the medicine graduate who converted and married a Muslim) had drawn flak. He had also taken part in the 'kar seva' for a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. What's more, the Congress leaders point out, Sugathan was in the forefront of the violence let loose against women in Sabarimala. "He was the one who attacked the NDTV journalist Sneha at Sabarimala," Chennithala said.
