BJP-ன் ஒரு வேட்பாளர் தீவிரவாதியா? அரசியல்வாதியா? | Sadhvi Pragya Singh is a Terrorist or Politician?
Channel: THE ROOSTER NEWS
Date: 2019-04-24

The 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign has set many alarming precedents. Fielding a candidate accused of terrorism is the latest one among them.

After turning Hindu majoritarianism into a key poll plank, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fielded Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast, as its nominee from the Bhopal Lok Sabha constituency in Madhya Pradesh. Thakur, facing trial under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), is currently out on bail. She has been pitted against Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who has, on several occasions, accused the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of promoting “Sanghi terror.”

On September 29, 2008, a bomb went off near a mosque in Malegaon, Maharashtra, killing six people and injuring dozens of others. Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) labelled Thakur one of the “principal conspirators” in the violence. Arrested in 2008, she spent nine years in jail. In 2015, a year after Narendra Modi became prime minister, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) changed tack and sought to drop the charges against her. However, the trial court refused to go along with the agency’s decision on the grounds that Thakur’s motorcycle was used in the blast.

Also read: Sadhvi Pragya Was First Arrested in Terror Case by BJP Government, Not Congress

Much like the Samjhauta Express blast case (which killed 68 people, of whom 43 were Pakistani citizens), the Malegaon case is marked by suspicious twists and turns gesturing towards institutional and political complicity. Nearly four years ago, Rohini Salian, a senior law officer and the special public prosecutor in the Malegaon case, made a public statement alleging that the Modi government was putting pressure on her to “go soft” on the case.



This is the first time a mainstream political party – that too a party ruling at the Centre – has fielded a candidate implicated in a terror case.

It may be argued that Indian politics is no stranger to fielding candidates implicated in incidents of violence, many of whom later go on to become legislators. We are well aware that political parties of all ideological stripes field candidates suspected of having a hand in riots, communal killings and various other acts of violence, which are collective as well as individualistic in nature.

In fact, these tainted candidates are picked as nominees for the very reasons that make them criminals in the eyes of the law.

It’s this very legacy of violence they carry that endears them to the party leadership and adds to their winning potential. The systemic perversion and popular acceptance of such candidates is a comment on the state of the political system, on those who preside over it as well as those who help them to get them to this position of supremacy. Pragya Singh Thakur’s candidacy is born out of this murky lineage.

It would be facile to compare and measure the degree of heinousness involved in riots or acts of terror. It would be cynical – even perverse – to ask which kind of violence is more heinous than others, which perpetrators are guiltier, which victims more traumatised, more deserving of justice. Yet, these are questions that have assumed urgency in the absence of political morality.

Moreover, the BJP has chosen to field a terror-tainted candidate at a time when the party is running a shrill campaign on the issue of national security. In fact, if there’s any dominant theme noticeable in the BJP’s campaign, it’s the prime minister’s repeated projection of himself and his party as the only guarantors of India’s national security. The contradictions underlining the BJP’s strident anti-terror campaign and the party’s deliberate move to field Thakur, who is herself implicated in an act of terror, are too glaring to ignore.

On the other hand, it may be argued that Thakur’s candidacy and BJP’s campaign around majoritarian nationalism are a chip off the same block. Throughout the Lok Sabha campaign so far, BJP leaders have played upon the “hurt Hindu” sentiment and tried to turn that sentiment into resentment and anger against Muslims. The poll narrative scripted by the BJP has been dominated by a “saint” and a “villain” situated at two ends of the political and ideological spectrum, each seeming to stand in for two religious communities. It’s necessary to locate Thakur’s candidacy within this larger BJP/RSS narrative to understand its implications.

#PragyaSinghThakur #election2019 #bjpcandidate

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