“Women will be treated at par with men,” the Haji Ali trust told the top court, roughly two months after the Bombay high court struck down a ban on women’s entry into shrine’s inner sanctum. The trust had challenged the verdict in court.
The development is likely to bolster a larger campaign for allowing women entry into shrines and strike down what activists say is regressive gender bias among religious leaders. Earlier this year, activist Trupti Desai and hundreds of women entered the holy Shani Shani temple in Maharashtra. A case for lifting a similar decades-old ban at Kerala’s Sabarimala shrine is being heard by the Supreme Court.
In the Haji Ali case, the HC had said an entry ban violated women’s fundamental rights and asked the state to ensure protection for female devotees. The decision had come on a petition by a Muslim women’s foundation that asked the court to restore the shrine’s regulations to 2012, when women were allowed into the sanctum sanctorum albeit through separate queues and at restricted timings.
