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Bindu Ammini, one of the two women who first entered the Sabarimala temple in January this year, alleged she was attacked with chilli and pepper spray outside Ernakulam city police commissioner's office on Tuesday.
According to reports, she had emerged out of the commissioner's office to pick up a file from her car.
Ammini, along with women's rights activist Trupti Desai, is expected to visit Sabarimala today to offer prayers at the Lord Ayyappa shrine. Bindu and Kanakadurga, both women below 50 years, became the first women to reach Sabarimala's sannidhanam with police protection in the wee hours on January 2, setting foot in the temple after the Supreme Court verdict struck down the custom of barring women of menstrual age from entering the hill shrine.
"We will visit Sabarimala temple today on Constitution Day. Neither state government nor police can stop us from visiting the temple. Whether we get security or not, we will visit the temple today," Desai told ANI.
Desai had made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the temple in November last year, weeks after the Supreme Court lifted the ban that prevented women and girls between the age of 10 and 50 from entering the famous Ayyappa shrine in Kerala and held that the centuries-old Hindu religious practice was illegal and unconstitutional.
A five-member Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the issue of women's entry to places of worship, with respect to its Sabarimala verdict of September 2018, had been referred to a larger seven-judge bench. The Supreme Court has kept the review petitions filed against the verdict pending. The court added that there would not be any stay on its September 2018 judgment that permitted entry to women of all age groups to Sabarimala.
