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The lawyer in the Sabarimala case has caught the nation's eye for arguing that women need to be kept out of the temple to preserve the deity's 'celibacy'.
Although the Supreme Court this week reserved its judgement on the issue of allowing women of a certain age entry into the Sabarimala temple, lawyer Sai Deepak J is keeping his fingers crossed. The Hyderabad-born engineer and IIT Kharagpur educated lawyer - he has appeared in the matter on behalf of two women's groups and a devotee sangam - has received an overwhelming amount of attention for this, his very first case as Counsel in the Apex Court. More because recently, he adopted an unusual argument to bolster his case: That keeping women out had nothing to do with misogyny or the 'impurity' of menstruation, but was to protect the celibacy status of the deity Ayyappa.
After eight hearings of a PIL that was filed in 2016, pushing for female devotees between the ages of 10 and 50 to be allowed into the temple, the fivemember bench, led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, has still not indicated its decision. But Deepak's...