Sabarimala and other issues-Complaint to the Chief Minister of Kerala

from: Ravindran P M <raviforjustice@gmail.com>
to: CHIEF MINISTER KERALA <chiefminister@kerala.gov.in>
cc: CM Office Kerala <cmoffice@kerala.gov.in>
date: Oct 26, 2018, 10:50 AM
subject: Complaint-Sabarimala and other issues

Attention: Mr Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Mnister of Kerala

1. Refer my e mail of 1/9/16, copy given at the end of this mail.

2. Needless to say my hopes lie shattered.

3. You will no doubt go down in the history of Kerala as the last and worst commie Chief Minister of the State, nay, of the country itself. Maybe for some it would make no difference whether it is notoriety or fame that follows them.

4. I have read reports of you earlier telling media persons to get out in the most uncouth manner. And even reminding the Prime Minister that we have a federal system of government. And now you and your ministers are heard telling the Thanthri of Sabarimala that they are mere employees of the Devaswam Board. Now let me tell you that it will do you a lot of good if you get the following facts correct.

5. We not only have a federal system of governance, we are a democratic country too. I hope you understand what democracy means. It is rule 'of the people, for the people, by the people' as an American President put it. And the National Commission to review the working of the Constitution has unambiguously stated that 'the highest office of the land it that of a citizen'.

6. And before I go to your failures and perfidies as the Chief Minister, responsible for all that an elected government is tasked to do, let me place it on record that you and your ministers are our employees. Have no doubt about that.

7. Coming to the Thanthri of Sabarimala, being an employee of the Dewaswam Board, it is as much a fraud as the communist party did with land reforms- took land from the then owners and distributed it to a small group of persons and now doling out tax money to these very erstwhile owners for their sustenance. In the case of Sabarimala too the situation is no different. Sabarimala and the Ayyappa temple there is older than the State, the Dewaswam Board and even your party at the world level. The Thantri's income possibly is much lesser than what he would have had, had not the management of the temple's affairs been usurped by the government in a grossly unconstitutional manner and vested with the devaswom boards. We are well aware of the misuse of the voluntary donations of devotees to the temple by the employees of the devaswom boards, starting with its President.

8. This complaint will not be complete without recounting some ( I repeat some) of your gross failures during the last couple of years of governance. In the reverse chronological order they are as follows.

9. Your visit to UAE, with your family, at tax payers' cost,  with the declared objective of motivating NRKs to contribute towards the states' reconstruction after the floods. It appears, from reports in the media, after your return, that you have admitted to having had talks with business people to invest in Kerala rather than contribute to reconstruction of the flood ravaged state. In the background of the Global Investors Meet, hosted by the Government of Kerala periodically, this trip was wholly uncalled for, futile and waste of tax payer' money.

10. The plans to send 17 of your cabinet collegues abroad along with a team of about 190 bureaucrats was nothing but preposterous and we have to thank Mr Narendra Modi led government for denying permission. I am also wondering whether you and all the 17 ministers are redundant given the fact that you could plan to leave the state with your unfulfilled responsibilites of rehabilitating the victims of the flood, many of whom are still in relief camps.

11. Even when the rehabilitation activities were at its peak, you had left for the capital of the capitalist world, acclaimedly for treatment of an undisclosed ailment. While health and the treatment of indivduals are necessarily a private matter, it has to be an exception in the matter of public servants. Like freedom of speech and organisation, though fundmental rights under the Constitution, are denied to soldiers. In any case the public have a right to know of your ailment for two reasons: one, they are funding the treatment and all associated costs and two, they have to know if you are sufficiently health to fulfill the responsibilites that go with your assignment. The fact that you had not even handed over your duties while being out of the State for treatment tend to suggest that the ailment was not serious. And that also raises the question why you had misused your office to splurge tax payers money for a treatment that should have been availed within the State, which you yourself had boasted was amoung the best in the country.

12. That the floods were man made and attributable to the ineptitude of your government is no more in doubt. The involvement of the government in the rescue and relief operations were even more condemnable. Had it not been for the prompt and daring interventions of individuals and unorganised groups even the death toll would have been many fold. Even at the peak of these operations you and some of your ministers were only seen creating controversies, including insulting the armed forces who were here on aid to civil authorities.

13. The investigations into the sex scandals involving Bishop Franco Mulaikkal, priests, Fathers Abraham Varghese and Jayes K George, MLA P K Sasi have not only been unsatisfactory but also invites comparison with the molestation case in a Malappuram cinema hall. In the latter case, the theater owner had been arrested for an alleged delay in informing the police. As per  report in the Mathrubhumi of 5/6/18, the incident happened in a theater in Edappal on 18/4/18. The theater owner while going through the cctv recordings had come to know of this and reported the matter to the police on 26/4/18. The police had not taken any action till 12/5/18 when the information, along with the vidoe clip, was shared with Mathrubhumi and the accused was arrested. Now, in the cases involving the Bishop and the priests, the matter had been reported to the Church authorities who had been sitting on it and caliming that they were investigating into it. They NEVER even reported the matter to the police. Finally teh victims had to go to the police themselves. And those who supported the bishops's victims even had to stage protest outside the High Court of Kerala before things started to move, even though at snails pace. To the best of my knowledge the offence was one which warranted arrest under non-bailable charges.

14. The case of MLA Sasi has still not been registered by the police, even though the media has covered it adequately to warrant his arrest and prosecution too. And the party is certainly entitled to make their own investigation under party rules but not under the CrPC. If the Chief Minister, who is also in charge of the Home portfolio and controls the police, doesn't know this it is time that he relinquished the job on grounds of incompetence.

15. To cut this list short, I invite your attention to the following video reports on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/cHZTz-Rl1Vc  a muslim girl to CM, Kerala

https://youtu.be/15Qws5jVPvI  an advocate on judiciary, govt and faith

https://youtu.be/zEYThhjVoGo  a christian on xtian women adventurers

16. You may also like to hear what Vivek Oberoi, a bollywood star, has to say on Sabarimala. His views are at https://www.facebook.com/100002730811315/posts/1522850971149249/
And the views of Mr K P Anil Kumar during a talk show on Mathrubhumi channelon 20 Oct 2018 on the subject  Kaval kondu kaaryamundo? Your representative Mr Mohanan was also a participant.

17. Strictly speaking when a democraticlly elected government loses the faith of the majority it is required to demit office and not cling on to it claiming that they have been elected for 5 years and taking advantage of the absence a law to recall elected representatives. If the argument is that the ayyappa devotees and their supporters do not constitute the majority then the challenge is to prove it by calling for mid term elections.

Yours truly,

P M Ravindran
raviforjustice@gmail.com
26 Oct 2018

from: Ravindran P M <raviforjustice@gmail.com>
to: CHIEF MINISTER KERALA <chiefminister@kerala.gov.in>
date: Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 9:58 AM
subject: 100 days of governance!

Coming events cast their shadows before them!

These 100 days have been disappointing.

The reduction in the number of personal staff, though notional, was welcome. One cannot understand why ministers should have more than 3 assistants as personal staff.

The decision to do away with police escort doesn't seem to have been implemented.

The attitude towards citizens' right to know what their government is doing is totally unacceptable.

The Kerala State Information Commission is defunct. Not that it needs additional information commissioners to be appointed urgently. What is needed is to ensure that the available information commissioner does his job in the letter and spirit of the law. In fact the loss to the exchequer due to information commissioners not imposing the mandatory penalty can be more than the 2G, Coalgate and Vadragate put together. While the defaulting information commissioners are liable to be prosecuted under Sec 219 of the IPC no such action has been ever taken by the concerned authorities. Or should we take it that the role of all public servants is only to cheat and loot the public?

To cut the story short, the only hope I had when you took over the reins of government was that the onus was on you to provide meaningful and purposeful governance if your party has to retain the toe hold it has in this nation. It seems you are not yet alive to this responsibility.

Hoping for better days!

NERO FIDDLED WHILE ROME BURNT…

Remembering the above quip in the context of the events that have unfolded in Kerala during the last week, post the Sabarimala verdict of the apex court on 28 Sep 2018, is not just coincidental.

It was a 4:1 judgment of a bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, himself. The majority opted to rule in favour of a cosmetic notion, touted as gender equality. Cosmetic, because the restriction in Sabarimala is not a matter of gender discrimination as girls below 10 years of age and women above 50 years of age are permitted and they have been visiting the temple since ages. And, more importantly, there are more fundamental issues which are required to be viewed from the point of gender discrimination.

In our country women have been demanding 33 percent (I wonder why only 33 and not 50 percent) reservation in Parliament and state legislatures for many, many years now. And, shouldn’t such reservation be there in the judiciary too? 

In fact the very composition of the Constitution bench needs to be challenged on this ground of gender discrimination.

The only woman member of the bench had given a dissenting judgment which is acclaimed by even many former judges and legal luminaries as a more balanced and acceptable one in a plural society like ours.

Various reports in the media, sharing views by legal experts tend to suggest that there is an apparent conflict between Article 25(2) (b) and Article 26 of the Constitution.

Article 25(2)(b) mandates the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus. But Article 26 provides the right to every religious denomination: (a) to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes; (b) to manage its own affairs in matters of religion; (c) to own and acquire movable and immovable property; and (d) to administer such property in accordance with law.

The conflict is apparently in identifying Hindu religious institutions of a public character and religious denomination.

Just because public are allowed to visit a temple it doesn’t mean that it is a public place, like, say a park or a theatre. (In fact couldn’t the Chamber of the CJI be considered to be a public place being funded by the tax payers’ money? Well, I can almost hear some legal pundit shouting blasphemous!)   

Coming to denomination, here are a few definitions of the term from various dictionaries/thesauruses.

*(Theology) a group having a distinctive interpretation of a religious faith and usually its own organization- Collins English Dictionary

*A class of persons or things distinguished by a specific name-Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary

*A set of the same persons, called by the same name and therefore of the same views.-Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms

*Religious group, belief, sect, persuasion, creed, school-Collins Thesaurus of the English Language

*A religious group that has slightly different beliefs from other groups that share the same religion- Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus

I am sure that we need not leave it to the judiciary to give any new meaning to this term. (Remember how the judges did that to the term ‘consultation’ used in Article 124(2) and usurped the powers of the President to appoint judges?)

By no stretch of imagination can the temple of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala be considered a public place nor can the rights of the denomination of Ayyappa devotees to manage its own affairs in matters of religion be abrogated.

While on these two articles of the Constitution, one glaring inequality, nay, blatant discrimination, needs to be highlighted.

While the rights under Article 26 is provided to every religious denomination, the mandate of Article 25(2) (b) is to throw open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus only.

Now even hard core rationalists cannot deny that if any change has to be made it is to be made for Article 25(2)(b) by making it non-religion specific.

Coming to matters of equality, the apex court itself needs to answer some simple questions with respect to its own functioning.

One, forgetting the lack of equality in the number of women judges in our courts, do the courts treat the litigants themselves as equal? Here, let us not forget that it is the litigants who are the raison d'etre of the judiciary.

Two, what have the judges been doing to reduce the massive back log of cases which have reduced justice to a farce in our courts?

Three, given that the judiciary is only another organ created by the Constitution, why is it that the judiciary has long vacations that are not available to the other organs?

An article dated 23 May 2014 in Live Law had the title: Justice Delivery System Working 365 Days; Pressing Needs of the Indian Judiciary. And this was not the author’s imagination taking wings. It was a need articulated by the then CJI while addressing the legal fraternity during the foundation stone laying ceremony of the building for Rajasthan Bar Council at Jodhpur. But the only requirement projected by him to enable this was to improve the judge to population ratio by increasing the number of judges to at least 3 to 4 times the present strength.

I will hold anybody who talks of judge to population ratio instead of the judge to case/docket ratio as incompetent to be a judge at all. I have with me a Power Point Presentation, authored by Adv KTS Tulsi, on the subject ‘Justice Delayed in India’ for a program of the Supreme Court Bar Association on 24 Aug 2004. Here are some statistics presented by him:

Cases filed in one year (1999): India - 13.6 Million (13,668,073); USA- 93.81 Million

Docket’s per judge: India - 987; USA- 3235

He had quoted these figures to demolish the judge to population ratio quoted by Malimath in his report.

The judiciary is also known to propagate another preposterous theory- that even if the judgment is wrong it has to be complied with. Is there any wonder, that the crime rate is increasing the way it is and people are taking law into their own hands? Even advocates, quite often, seem to prefer to take to the streets rather that pursue the judicial process.

Coming back to Sabarimala, while there is no room for doubt that the present situation is the creation of the apex court, the role of Pinarayi Vijayan led government in Kerala in handling the events have been no less abominable. In the name of enforcing the judicial order the police, driven by the government, has been almost on a murderous spree. Devotees protesting peacefully on the routes to the temple have been brutally assaulted and photographs of them being lathi charged, bleeding profusely and dragged through roads have flooded social media. The rampaging police, in riot gear, and some doubted to be even hired or party hooligans in uniform, can be seen wantonly kicking and hitting with lathis, parked vehicles and causing them unwarranted damage. A few hundred cases, some even non bailable, have also been registered against protestors. Rahul Easwar, a strong defender of the faith and the rituals and a peaceful protestor, was arrested and allegedly taken to the police station wrapped in a tarpaulin. He was apparently given third degree treatment by the police and is currently admitted in the Medical College Hospital at Thiruvananthapuram with a slip disc in the spine.

Interestingly there were no devotees from the newly permitted age group who visited Sabarimala during the five days from 17 to 22 Oct 2018 when the temple had opened for the monthly rituals. The intelligence agencies had warned the state government of terror outfits and naxalites exploiting the opportunity for nefarious reasons. But, as it turned out, it was the state government that arranged for a posse of about 250 police personnel led by an IG of Police to escort two women- Rehana Fathima, an activist notorious for her involvement in Kiss of Love protests that had rocked the State more than a year back, and Kavitha Jakkal, a Christian reporter based at Hydrabad- to the temple. Even while emotions ran high amoung the helpless devotees the police managed to take them up to 200 meters short of the temple. It was then that the employees of the temple also joined the protestors. Finally, the activists and their escorts had to retreat when the trustees of the temple and the thanthri, the ultimate authority on religious matters and the rituals of the temple, threatened to close the temple. There were a few other women too, mostly in the role of activists, who tried to use the opportunity provided by the apex court to visit the temple, but were dissuaded by the protesting devotees.

I cannot say if the apex court judgment in the hands of Pinarayi led Government can be compared to a bouquet of flowers in the hands of a monkey or a murderous weapon in the hands of a serial murderer. The fact remains that the fear of their rights related to their faith being violated was writ large and there were reports of protests from devotees even in far away Australia, Canada and the US of A.

In any case it is fact on record now that the Government did not do anything to avert the untoward events. The option to file a review petition was rejected in spite of the persistent demand from devotees ever since the judgment was out. It was almost as if Pinarayi Vijayan was taking it out on the innocent devotees his rabid hatred for Modi. The fact that he had been exposed in a 700 crore non promised aid from UAE and that the Union Government had denied permission to 17 of his ministers to visit foreign countries to seek help from non-resident Keralites for ‘reconstructing the flood ravaged state’ had also added to the grouse of the CM and consequent misery of the devotees determined to protect their faith and traditions.

If anybody thinks that Team Pinarayi cannot be faulted for their decision to enforce a court verdict there is a need to recapitulate how they had treated many a court verdict in the past.

When the apex court ordered closing of all liquor vends within 500 meters of the highways, the government downgraded many of them to enable their Beverages Corporation outlets to do business as usual. (Incidentally this also provided an occasion to expose how shoddy the record keeping of the public authorities were because the existing status of most roads were not even available.)

There was an order banning admission for medical courses in two colleges and the government went to the extent of issuing an ordinance to enable them to circumvent the court order.

There is an order directing handing over a church at Piravom from one faction to another. It has also not been implemented for more than year now.

The order on minimum wages for nurses in private hospitals and nursing homes also remains to be implemented.

Not only has the government led by Pinarayi Vijayan slept over these orders their reaction to the order banning triple talaq was that it was a challenge to the minorities.

And when there was an order to regulate the slaughtering of animals, the party cadres spread the canard that it was a ban on beef and went to the extent of conducting beef festivals even in colleges owned by the Dewaswam Boards.

Pinarayi Vijayan is leading the only Marxist party led government in the country. Apparently he and his ministers are themselves convinced that they will be the last communist ministers of this country.  That could be the only reason why they have taken their prime duty, of governance, out of their agenda.  More than two months after the floods there were reportedly 66 relief camps still in operation with 1848 persons in them. Even the meager compensation of Rs 10,000/- has not been distributed fully.

It was during the peak of relief operations that one of his ministers caused a controversy with a visit to Germany to participate in a social event. This was followed by the visit of the Chief Minister himself to the US of A for 21 days for treatment of an undisclosed ailment. Since reports of ministers being ill disposed are often reported by the media, speculation is ripe amoung the public about the nature of ailment which had taken the hard core Marxist, Pinarayi Vijayan, to the epicenter of capitalism in the world. The Lavlin scam, of the times when he had been the Electricity Minister more than a decade back, is still making the rounds of the courts.

And more recently, it was reported that the CM and 17 of the remaining 20 ministers were going abroad with paraphernalia of 190 public servants, to beg for aid from NRKs for the reconstruction of the flood ravaged state. One wonders that if during crisis the ministers can go on foreign jaunts, under whatever pretext, do the state need these ministers at all. It was thanks to the firm stand of the Union Government that only the CM could go (to the UAE). And he did it with his family at the cost to the already broke public exchequer.

The temple at Sabarimala has closed today after the monthly rituals. The peak pilgrimage season is just another month away. It remains to be seen how the lack of basic amenities and the controversies are going to affect the flow of devotees visiting the shrine from mid November to mid January. But the campaign not to offer any money or buy prasadams at Dewaswam controlled temples has already started making an impact. Hundis are getting filled with chits inscribed with ‘Swaminye saranam’ (the chant of Ayyappa devotees) instead of money. For those who are ignorant about culture and its values, it may not matter. But there is also a campaign to boycott lotteries, which, apart from its liquor vends, is the biggest source of income for the government.  Ultimately, citizens are learning where to hit and hurt.

Swami Saranam!

22 Oct 2018