Bhumata Brigade leader Trupti Desai on Monday said she would be seeking police protection after having allegedly received a string of death threats since she announced her intention to worship at Sabarimala temple in Kerala following the Supreme Court verdict allowing women of all ages to enter the temple.
Ms. Desai said she had received more than 200 posts of an extremely offensive nature — several among them threats to her life — since Friday last week on her Facebook page threatening her with dire consequences if she attempted to visit Sabarimala. “Since I approved of the SC verdict and announced my decision to visit the temple, I have been bombarded with a continuous stream of death threats and expletives. My fake pictures are circulating on social media in a bid to tarnish my reputation. While I have received threats in the past, the magnitude and the incessant profanities in the posts this time is appalling,” Ms. Desai told The Hindu .
She said she would be requesting the Pune Commissioner of Police to grant her protection in Pune as well as during her visit to the temple in Kerala.
“We have not yet fixed the date for the Sabarimala visit, but it would probably be sometime after Diwali,” she said, adding that she was undeterred by the threats, and was more than ever determined to offer worship at Sabarimala.
Ms. Desai’s highly publicised temple-entry ‘crusades’ over the past few years to demolish gender barriers at shrines across Maharashtra has led to temple trustees opening the inner sanctum of the historic Shani Shingnapur Temple in Ahmednagar district to women in April 2016.
She had also mounted a campaign to seek entry for women in the core area of the Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai. Ms. Desai had written more than once to the Sabarimala trustees, demanding entry to women of all ages.
“It is patently unjust to debar women for a whole month, owing to their menstruating cycle. We strongly challenge these outmoded notions of purity and deem it a gross injustice to devotees of Lord Ayappa,” Ms. Desai had said in a letter in 2016, exhorting the trustees to take “an historic decision” by ending the gender discrimination once and for all by lifting the ban.
In December last year, she had announced her decision to visit the temple, but called it off owing to a potential law and order situation.
