Journalist Kavitha Jakkal of Hyderabad-based Mojo TV and activist Rehana Fatima were just 10 minutes away from creating history at the Sabarimala shrine. But at the end, they couldn’t. On the third day of the protests, the women were forced to return from Kerala’s Lord Ayappa Temple. 

The protesters forced the cops to back down and convince the women to return. The women couldn’t enter the temple despite 300 cops giving them security. The unprecedented protests saw the priests stopping to perform the rituals and joining the make agitators. 

Kerala Inspector General S Sreejith, who was leading the security cover, said, ‘we have told the female devotees about the situation, they will now be going back. So we are pulling pack. They have decided to return.’

Earlier, Sreejith reportedly told the protesters that, ‘even he is a believer of Sabarimala.’ He also said that he had come to the temple ‘as a servant of law’. ‘We are doing our job and we won’t attack the devotees. We have to obey the law,’ the IG reportedly said. 

Their women’s attempt to reach the shrine came a day after a New Delhi-based woman reporter of a foreign media outlet made a failed bid to visit the temple.

There have been strong protests by devotees opposing the entry of girls and women of menstrual age into the Lord Ayyappa temple.

The woman reporter is in her late 20s while the details of the second woman, who was carrying Irumudikkettu (holy bundle), was not immediately known.

If they climbed the hills, they would be the first women from the menstruating age group to visit the Sabarimala temple of Lord Ayyappa after the Supreme Court order permitting women of all age groups to enter the shrine.

On Thursday, the New Delhi-based woman journalist was stopped midway by devotees opposing the entry of women of menstrual age into the hill shrine.

The journalist accompanied by her male colleague, a foreigner, descended the hills from Marakkoottam area in the face of mounting protests.