New Delhi: Amid the ongoing legal wrangle over Sabarimala temple over entry of women, the Supreme Court has directed that a special law is required to run it. The apex court made this observation on Wednesday during the hearing of a plea by the erstwhile Pandalam royal family which has age-old ties with the famed temple of Lord Ayyappa.
The apex court also flayed the state government for not coming up with legislation for the temple's administration. In this context, it observed that the hill shrine cannot be compared with other temples.
A bench headed by Justice N V Ramana asked the state to place before it by third week of January next year the legislation, also covering the aspects of welfare of pilgrims visiting there.
As the government submitted the draft bill before the bench the latter expressed apprehensions about one-third reservation clause proposed for the appointment of women in the temple administration.
If the decision of the larger bench (of the Supreme Court) on the entry of women of all ages into the hill shrine is against the previous 2018 verdict, how can the government go ahead with the reservation clause, the court wondered.
The state government said that for the time being, it proposes to give representation in the temple advisory committee to only those women who are above 50 years of age.
It was only last week that a five-member constitutional bench of the Supreme Court referred to a seven-member larger bench the decision on a clutch of review pleas challenging the 2018 verdict throwing open the temple to women who are in the menstruating age group.
The seven-judge bench will decide whether there is a need to review or stay the court's previous order regarding the entry of women of all ages into the hill shrine.
Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who headed the five-member bench days before retiring, had expressed doubt whether the question of essential religious practices should be left to the discretion of religious heads, and wanted clarity on this point.
This decision essentially meant that there is no bar on women's entry at Sabarimala and the apex court's 2018 verdict continues to be in force.
The apex court, by a majority verdict of 4:1, on September 28, 2018, had lifted the ban that prevented women and girls between the age of 10 and 50 from entering the Ayyappa shrine and had held that this centuries-old Hindu religious practice was illegal and unconstitutional.
The Venkateswara Temple at Tirumala, which is popularly referred to as the Tirupati temple, is run by Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), an independent trust which was formed by a special law -- TTD Act -- in 1932 by the then Madras Government. It also manages a few other temples in and around Tirumala and Tirupati in present-day Andhra Pradesh. In contrast, the Sabarimala temple is run by the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), "an autonomous body which oversees 1,248 temples in the regions corresponding to the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore." TDB was set up under the Travancore Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act XV of 1950.
