Varanasi/Nagpur: ‘Scantily-dressed” foreign women visiting Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi will have to wear “saree” before entering the “mandir’.
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Meanwhile, Travancore Devaswom Board president Prayar Gopalakrishnan has stoked up a controversy saying that women will be allowed to enter the famous Sabarimala Temple only when ‘a machine is invented to scan if it is the right time for a women to enter the temple’.
Kashi Vishwanath temple authorities on Monday denied media reports that they were planning to impose a dress code for the pilgrims and said it had only urged the devotees to wear “decent clothes”.
The temple authorities have said that they are fine with women entering wearing pants and jeans. “We have arranged saris for women and also dhotis [traditional wrap-around clothing] for men to ensure that they can cover themselves decently”, the temple’s chief executive officer PN Dwivedi told BBC Hindi.
Summary: “Neither any foreign woman is going to be stopped from offering prayer inside sanctum sanctorum nor we are enforcing any dress code”.
“These changes will be done gradually”.
Following this, the administration chose to introduce a dress code for such pilgrims.
Foreign tourists’ attire would be checked at two points first at the police outpost outside the temple campus where foreign tourists produce their passports before security personnel and checking will be done at temple counter inside the premises too. Apart from introducing this measure to maintain decency inside the KVT, Dwivedi said, taking footwear inside the temple premises has been completely banned even for VIPs as well as security personnel. Dwivedi said that changing rooms have been set up at both the places for the convenience of the tourists.
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Mr Dwivedi insisted that the new system was “not a dress code”, but would educate tourists and encourage them to “go back to their respective countries and tell about Indian attire and culture”.
