The women’s movement for the right of entry into religious spaces seeks to challenge gender- and caste-based hierarchies. The organisations leading it believe that the notion of equality should be extended to all spheres where women face discrimination.
The demand that women be allowed to enter and worship at religious spaces that they have been barred from signifies, to a large extent, women’s growing assertiveness in seeking equal rights in all spaces. This is viewed as an outcome of the increasing awareness and consciousness of the rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Although the resolution of the demand for democratisation of all spaces will involve a protracted legal process, which is under way, what is clear is that these movements do raise certain fundamental questions of discrimination and exclusion justified under the garb of traditional religious practices connected with a narrow biological determinism of purity and pollution as far as women are concerned. The demand and the movements initiated in various parts of the country by a cross section of religious denominations standing for reform from within should be taken seriously for they have a progressive component. Indian democracy must take cognisance of the movements, especially since these are led and represented by young people.
A larger and fundamental question is that it has the potential to shape the course of Indian democracy, challenging as it does hierarchies of gender and caste. Whether beliefs and customs can be changed by a judicial process that protects such practices on the basis of the general principle of pluralism or whether they should be allowed to undergo change by a painfully slow natural process of social evolution is the question Indian democracy will need to grapple with.
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