What Terror-Accused Sadhvi Pragya’s Candidature Means for India

What message is the BJP trying to deliver through 2008 Malegaon blast prime accused, Sadhvi Pragya?

Image of Sadhvi Pragya and the BJP symbol used for representational purposes.

(Photo: Arnica Kala / The Quint)

When the heat and dust of the 2019 general elections settle at some point, a number of lows will have to be counted, and the lowest among them would be the candidate of India’s largest and dominant political party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to contest from Bhopal: Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur.

A self-confessed ascetic always dressed in saffron, Thakur would like to cut a saintly figure taking on the Congress stalwart and former chief minister Digvijay Singh on his home turf – but she is a terror-accused out on bail.

The Truth About ‘Sadhvi’ Pragya

The truth about Thakur lies deep in the folders held by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), passed on to it by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) which investigated the Malegaon terror attack of September 2008 (there was another blast exactly two years prior to this, the two are often confused). Thakur, the prime accused in the case, was arrested in October that year, and has been out on bail since April 2017 on grounds of ill health.

Thakur was acquitted in a murder case but she continues to face trial under stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in a Mumbai court in the terror case, and will go down in India’s election history as the first terror-accused to contest an election to the country’s Lok Sabha, sometimes zealously called the ‘temple of democracy’.

Nominating a terror-accused as a potential law-maker is contemptuous; that the BJP which once boasted of itself as a “clean and principled” alternative to the “corrupt and criminal” Congress should give her candidature, is indeed ironical.

It doesn’t matter why Pragya Singh Thakur was chosen to be an LS candidate – whether the BJP’s parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), pushed Thakur’s candidature to account for a perceived voters’ ennui with the issues on the table, or whether the party believed it would do well to project a harder strain of Hindutva.

It doesn’t matter whose idea it was – whether it was a move by the so-called modern-day ‘Chanakya’, BJP president Amit Shah, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “masterstroke” – considering such moves are attributed to him. What matters is the implications of this for India’s polity and society.

In the Modi-Shah Era, the ‘Fringe’ Has Become the Core

By selecting a terror-accused in an alleged Hindutva conspiracy against Muslims, as a candidate for Parliament, the BJP has pushed the envelope of hardline Hindutva farther than most would have thought possible five years ago. This is not mere normalising or mainstreaming hate politics. The mainstreaming of Hindutva had happened back in 1996-1999 during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s governments. It was symbolised when Hindutva icon Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s portrait came to be hung in the Parliament.

Then, the likes of Yogi Adityanath, Pragya Singh Thakur and others in the radical Sangh Parivar outfits were considered to be the rabid and hard-core fringe to Vajpayee’s – and to a lesser extent, LK Advani’s – ‘acceptable’ strain of Hindutva. Modi and Shah made the grade in between.

Now, in the Modi-Shah era of the BJP, the fringe has become the core. Militant and hard-line Hindutva is in. It is now the political Hindutva. Adityanath and Thakur are its faces. “I have come here to fight a political and religious war… we will win this dharm yudh,” said Thakur on Wednesday. The BJP’s core voters may be thrilled at this, but it cannot not ring alarms bells for the rest of us Indians.

Secondly, Thakur faces serious charges including that of waging war against the nation. Contrary to reports, she has not been given “a clean chit” in the Malegaon bomb blast case – yet. The NIA dropped charges framed under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, but Thakur continues to face trial under other criminal provisions. She was given bail in April 2017 because, as the bail order of the Bombay High Court stated, she was “suffering from breast cancer” and was unable “to even walk without support”.

Should a Possible Terrorist Even Represent People in the August House?

That such a person will appeal for people’s votes and may represent them in Lok Sabha, is surely a travesty of democratic and ethical norms. This is no longer only about poll arithmetic in Bhopal or Thakur’s “winnability”.

It is about a more fundamental question of whether a terror-accused should even aim to represent people in the august House. Indeed, those accused of crimes like murder, attempt to murder, and rape have won elections in the past; 33 percent of the MPs of the out-going Lok Sabha had criminal cases, according to a report of Association for Democratic Reforms.

But a possible terrorist? What would it mean to the country and to India’s image on the international stage?

Thirdly, the case against Thakur and others has taken curious turns, which gradually led to this moment in our history. Thakur was the first to be arrested in October 2008 by the Maharashtra ATS; there was no NIA then.

Revisiting the Malegaon Blast of 2008

On 29 September 29 2008, explosives hidden in an LML Freedom motorcycle went off in Malegaon, killing six instantly, and injuring more than 100. The motorcycle was traced to Surat and eventually as belonging to Thakur.

ATS teams arrested Lt Col Prasad Purohit and Major (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, and pieced together the conspiracy. The roles played by Abhinav Bharat, a “fringe” Hindutva outfit, and Dayanand Pandey aka Sudhakar Dwivedi, came forth. The teams visited Pune, Nashik, Indore and Bhopal.

It filed a charge-sheet in January 2009 in a Mumbai court, and a supplementary one in April 2011, naming 14 accused – with Thakur leading the list. Around this time, the NIA was given the charge of terror cases in Malegaon (2006 and 2008), Mecca Masjid, and Ajmer dargah.

Meanwhile, in December 2010, the CBI arrested Swami Aseemanand in the Samjhauta Train blasts case. He confessed in front of a magistrate, that radical Hindu groups had conspired to carry out a series of bomb blasts in Muslim-dominated areas as “revenge against jihadi terrorism”, listed all the cases handled by the NIA, and disclosed that this conspiracy was led by RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi. But he later withdrew his statements and has since, been acquitted.

Was Pragya Singh Thakur Really Absolved?

Thakur’s name came up at several points in this larger conspiracy, but she could only be linked to the motorcycle used in Malegaon 2008 case as its owner. This, intercepted conversations between Lt Col Purohit and others mentioning her repeatedly, and the statement of RSS worker Yashpal Bhadana who validated her presence at some of the conspiracy meetings, formed the evidence against Pragya Singh Thakur.

But this was not the case pursued. The NIA filed a fresh charge-sheet in 2016. In it, the agency dropped MCOCA (no conspiracy), showed the motorcycle was used by Kalsangra, chose to exclude Bhadana’s statements which he said had been made under duress, and remarked that evidence against Thakur was weak. It virtually exonerated Thakur – which her supporters now claim as “a clean chit”.

Far from such a chit, the special court in Mumbai ordered that Thakur and Purohit would both face trial and, in October last year, framed charges against her and six others. They face Section 16 (committing terrorist act) and Section 18 (conspiring to commit terrorist act) of the UAPA and charges of murder, criminal conspiracy and promoting enmity between communities under the IPC.

Pragya Singh Thakur’s Candidature Is Culmination of the Weakening of the Malegaon Terror Case

So, what happened in the intervening years? The answers lie with Rohini Salian, gutsy former special public prosecutor in Mumbai. She has spoken at length to sections of the media, in which she detailed how she was sidelined in this case and pressure was brought on her from June 2014 – a month after the Modi government took charge – “to go soft”. Salian narrated how an officer came to Mumbai to meet her, and convey this to her. Eventually, in an affidavit, she remarked how it tended to “hamper the judicial process” resulting in “weakening of the prosecution’s case”.

The process of weakening the Malegaon terror case, indeed the larger conspiracy involving radical Hindu groups, had begun five years ago. Thakur’s nomination is, in a sense, the culmination of that process.

Pragya Singh Thakur has repeatedly spoken of the case as “Congress conspiracy” and “torture” in jail – both election campaign points. And it is not a coincidence that Thakur has taken on Digvijay Singh, who, since 2008 – when most were unwilling to – spoke repeatedly of “saffron terror” or “Sanghi terror”.

The Bhopal contest, then, is a fight symbolic of this “Sanghi terror”, donning a respectable electoral face.

(Smruti Koppikar, Mumbai-based independent journalist and editor, has reported on politics, terror attacks, gender and development for nearly three decades for national publications. She tweets @smrutibombay. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)