Lakhs of women lined up the streets of Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram on Monday to perform the annual Attukal Pongala festival at Attukal Devi temple, amid renewed fear of coronavirus after six cases were reported from the state.
Many devotees were seen wearing masks to contain a possible infection due to the heightened alert but the number of worshippers was relatively low this time.
Temple’s officials, however, said more than 2.6 million people participated in the festival.
Usually women from south Kerala and neighbouring Tamil Nadu throng the temple, often called Sabarimala of women, in large numbers for the festival.
Devotees offer pongala, a gruel made of rice, jaggery, ghee and coconut, to the presiding deity. In 2009, the temple had entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest annual gathering of women (2.5 million then) in a single function.
Women offer Pongala — a gruel made of rice, jaggery, ghee and coconut during Attukal Pongala, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, Monday, March 09, 2020.
Situated at the heart of the state capital in Attukal, women converge on the last day of the 10-day festival to offer pongala.
Many foreigners also take part in the festival but this time they were advised to make the offering in their hotels. A team from Germany was sent back and advised to do the ritual at their hotel in Kovalam, a famous beach.
To clamp the spread of coronavirus infection, ‘pongala’ was held under strict vigil this time.
Many activists and others have appealed to the government to put some restrictions on such a large gathering but the Left-led government, which learned a lesson from Sabarimala incidents two years ago, was forced to overlook these concerns.
“Time is not conducive for such restrictions. We have asked them to take certain precautions and most of them heeded,” said state Devasom minister Kadakampally Surendran.
The state had witnessed large-scale violence in 2018 when the state government tried to implement the Supreme Court verdict which allowed women of all ages to worship at Sabarimala hill temple.
In the last general election, the ruling LDF had suffered a humiliating defeat winning a lone seat out of 20 and Sabarimala was attributed as a main reason for the drubbing.
A three-year-old boy in the state became the youngest to get infected in the country after he tested positive for coronavirus on Monday. The boy, whose father works in Italy, had returned with his parents by a Dubai flight.
A day before, five people of a family, including three who recently came back from Italy, tested positive for coronavirus in interim reports in Kerala, prompting authorities to put the state on high alert.
Three of the five people in Pathanamthitta district had returned from Italy last month and two others were infected after they came into contact with them.
There are 43 people who have been diagnosed with Covid-19 so far in India as hundreds have been quarantined across the country.
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