Ideal worship

In the 71st year of the creation of a country that was expected to be a modern one, priests and devotees have taken it upon themselves to flagrantly disobey a Supreme Court order and prevent women of child-bearing age to enter the Sabarimala temple. It took over three months from the time the order was pronounced for two women in their forties to finally enter the sanctum sanctorum, and they did so with the help of the secular apparatus of the state: A police escort.

Despite the statewide violence that broke out in protest, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan took credit for complying with a judicial verdict. A stray entry in secrecy and haste scarcely amounts to observing the true spirit of the law. And no matter the length of a human chain of women demanding equality on New Year’s Day, this exclusionary socio-religious practice will reassert itself unless Mr Vijayan follows up with some tangible enforcement.
 

Should he choose to do so, he could draw inspiration from an American president 61 years ago who confronted a societal issue no less febrile or seminal then than religion in India today: Racial segregation.

Dwight D Eisenhower is one of post-war America’s underrated presidents. Famously profane, he brought to his presidency the simple pragmatism he learnt as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces during World War II. The manner in which he chose to enforce a landmark Supreme Court ruling on desegregation in schools (Brown versus Board of Education of 1954) proved a model of courage and practical idealism.

In his magisterial 2012 biography of Eisenhower, Jean Edward Smith recounts the controversy that erupted in September 1957 in the Central High School at Little Rock, Arkansas, then a bastion of Jim Crow culture. Following Brown and related rulings, the Central High School board agreed to admit nine black students. The decision caused a furore among white supremacists, not least the Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High. The Arkansan governor called out the state National Guard claiming, falsely, that gun sales had soared and he needed to “protect the lives and property of citizens” (creating a fictitious emergency to fulfil a political agenda is clearly not new). He had Central High ringed by 250 guardsmen in full battle dress backed by a larger crowd of white demonstrators who blocked the black students from entering the school.

Eisenhower was determined to enforce the Supreme Court’s mandate. He had doggedly extended his predecessor Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the armed forces over considerable opposition and, after Brown, ordered desegregation in District of Columbia schools. Given the polarising nature of the dispute, he understood, too, the initial need for restraint. So he gave the Arkansas governor time to withdraw his troops (which he did) and announced that the court order would be “executed promptly and without disorder”.

But when the school reopened on September 23, demonstrators proved so hostile that the black students were led away under police escort. Eisenhower then asked Army chief of staff Maxwell Taylor to call out units of the 101st Airborne. “In my career I have learned…that if you have to use force, use overwhelming force and save lives thereby,” he told a colleague.

Leveraging his constitutional authority, an official proclamation ordered the demonstrators to disperse. The mob, however, grew, so Taylor was instructed to send the 101st to Little Rock immediately, and Eisenhower issued an Executive Order requisitioning the Arkansas National Guard for federal service. (Notably, the justice department instructed the 101st to prune units of black soldiers going to Arkansas.)

The next morning, when the usual hostile mob gathered, the area was cleared and the paratroopers escorted the children to school and back without further ado. This paratrooper escort handed off in late November to the National Guard, who continued the job for about a year. Eight of the nine students graduated from Central High and one became a bureaucrat in Jimmy Carter’s government.

In an interview soon after this action, Eisenhower said his decision to use the army wasn’t about desegregation or public order. “Goddamn it, it was the only thing I could do…It is a question of upholding the law – otherwise you have people shooting people.” Recall, this was seven years before Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, which ended electoral discrimination for African-Americans.

In India, leveraging the machinery of state to settle disturbances arising from matters of faith is not unheard of. During the anti-Sikh riots, West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu placed Calcutta, with its significant Sikh minority, under curfew, avoiding the carnage that marked Delhi. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, he called Defence Minister Sharad Pawar and deployed the army, saving the city’s sizeable Muslim population from certain violence. On Sabarimala, detractors have argued over the propriety of the judiciary determining matters of personal faith. Mr Vijayan has countered that faith is not above the Constitution; he needs more robust action to underline the courage of his conviction.