A list submitted by the Kerala government to the Supreme Court, containing the details of 51 women below 50 years age who had visited the Sabarimala shrine since the apex court’s ruling, has been found to be riddled with contradictions and irregularities, reports The Indian Express.
Leaders from opposition parties severely criticised the Kerala government for the inaccurate list.
It is believed that the report prepared by the Kerala Police was only meant to be filed before the court, but had been mistakenly released into the public domain.
Among the names in the list, not a single woman belongs to Kerala, and all the documented age of all the women ranges from 41 to 49. Upon being contacted, in nine cases, the calls were picked up by men who stated that they had no link with the woman named in the list, while in as many as six other cases the women stated that they were older than what was mentioned in the list. In two other cases, the respondents maintained that they had made a mistake while entering the age in the online portal.
Senior CPI (M) leader and Devaswom Minister Kadakampally Surendran also expressed uncertainty over whether the 51 women in the list had actually been inside the shrine, stating, “A lot of women in the age group of 10 to 50 had registered their names for darsan. Of them, 51 had taken the queue. We don’t know whether they had darsan or not. It is not an affidavit but only a list. If someone in the list now says that her age was above 50, let them do so. We don’t have any mechanism to cross-check it.”
BJP state president P S Sreedharan Pillai lambasted the state government, calling the inaccurate list an attempt to influence the pending review petition in the apex court.
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