Thiruvananthapuram: Top national leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including party president Amit Shah and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are scheduled to visit Kerala this month amid tensions in the state of the issue of allowing women entry to the revered Sabarimala temple.
The leaders’ visits come in the backdrop of a court order ending a long-standing ban on women at the Hindu temple, and subsequent visits by a number of women to the shrine that have sparked violence across the state since the dawn of the New Year.
Political observers say the BJP is poised to gain political capital from the fallout over women entering the Sabarimala temple.
The women’s entry was legitimate because India’s Supreme Court ruled that there should be no gender discrimination at the temple.
But the state unit of the BJP has been able to fan the discontent felt by many Hindu faithful over the incident.
PM Modi is expected to visit at least four districts in Kerala — Kollam, Palakkad, Pathanamthitta and Thrissur — during his stay in the state, likely from January 15 and 27.
The visits by Modi and Shah are expected to heat up the political battle ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Shortly after a third woman had defied the tradition and entered the Sabarimala temple, state chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan had taunted the BJP, asking “Isn’t there a shutdown because one more woman has entered the temple?”
CPM state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan dismissed Amit Shah on Saturday, saying “He doesn’t have the heft to shake up Kerala”.
As violence escalated in the state over Friday and Saturday, crods targeted residences and offices of top BJP and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) leaders.
On Friday night, there were a series of attacks targeted at top leaders of the two parties. In Thalassery, a crude bomb was hurled at the ancestral house of BJP MP, V. Muraleedharan. Only minutes before that, a bomb was hurled at the residence of A.N. Shamseer, a CPM MLA in Thalassery.
Shortly after that incident, unidentified persons threw a crude bomb at the residence of P. Sasi, a former district secretary of the CPM, causing serious damage to the house, and another CPM worker was hurt in a knife attack.
In response to the attacks on party workers and bomb attacks on the residences of leaders, authorities pressed into service eight platoons of armed forces in Thalassery. Police also conducted a flag march to bring the situation under control.
Elsewhere in the state, Kannur and Adoor also witnessed violence and prohibitory orders were clamped in Adoor taluk for three days.
A number of examinations of various universities the state have been postponed owing to the violence over the past few days, and the opening of classes in the new semester beginning January is yet to be decided.
