“I have no right to a real opinion, due to the fact that I’m quite ignorant about Hinduism, but -— if this temple group believes it proper to recognize distinctions of caste and sex, should a government really be able to butt in and say “you can’t practice your faith anymore”?”
The peculiar nature of caste discrimination & the need to break it means that the Indian constitution & the Courts have taken a much more harder line on matters pertaining to Hinduism. So much so that civil laws for Hindus (India allows for separate laws under the civil code -governing marriage & inheritance etc) is pretty much the same as secular laws elsewhere whereas the Christians & especially the Muslims, are governed by religious code to a point where Hindu women have more rights under the “Hindu” laws that Muslim women have under the “Sharia”- (civil not criminal) or the Christian women have under the “Christian” laws. The courts are far more reluctant to interfere in the laws of the minorities than in those of the majority. Christian women (occasionally also Muslim women) have filed cases against parts of their religion based codes essentially arguing that their rights as Indian citizens protected by the constitution should override any religion derived law and asking for the same rights that Hindu women have. Both the Christian and muslim clergy are seen as the main blockers in these matters, resisting change.
However, one general observation: religion is a matter of choice. If I don't want to be a Hindu, I can be a Baptist (and many have made that conversion.) If I don't want to be a Catholic, I can be a Buddhist. I can be an atheist. Any law restricting religion, is in actually a law restricting my religious choice or my religious "free exercise" rights, to put it in American constitutional terms.
So a government that states: your clergy shall be selected in such-and-such a manner, your temple rites shall be carried out thus-and-so, your ethics (even assuming they don't involve force or fraud) shall conform to pages 160 - 803 of the government religious licensing code: this is not empowering to people. This is the forcible suppression of religious free exercise.
It makes it impossible for anyone to live in the manner of their traditions, by substituting conformity in the face of coercive government power (in the name of liberation) for the actual liberty to choose.
In one of the USSC cases involving the Amish, one Justice complained that an Amish kid who would have had the interest and the talent to become a concert pianist, would never become one with a traditional Amish education. He failed to mention that if you abolish traditional Amish education, nobody would have the glorious untrammeled freedom to live their lives as Amish.
They wouldn't even have freedom of association!
So that's my general attitude: as long as there's no force or fraud, let these religious groups live their lives by their own best practices--- not yours.