2024 LS polls: ‘Sanyasin’ Pragya sulks after being benched in Bhopal by BJP
Pragya Thakur has been camping in Bhopal ever since her party, the BJP, denied her a ticket last week to seek re-election to the Lok Sabha and she seems visibly angry
Through the past five years of her stint as the Lok Sabha MP from Bhopal, Pragya Thakur was an infrequent visitor to the Madhya Pradesh capital; usually seen in her constituency either at official functions or at programmes organised by Hindutva outfits. The self-styled saffron-clad Sadhvi has, however, been camping in Bhopal ever since her party, the BJP, denied her a ticket last week to seek re-election to the Lok Sabha – and, she isn’t just visible in her constituency now but is also visibly angry.
The terror-accused MP may have told her supporters that she had “not sought a ticket” from the BJP to contest the upcoming polls and was content “fighting for faith and truth” as a “sanyasin” (ascetic). Her actions in the past few days have, however, left many convinced that Thakur is sulking over being benched by her party and may not be as cooperative in the election campaign of former Bhopal Mayor Alok Sharma, who replaced her as the BJP’s Bhopal candidate, as her party may have hoped.
Praise for Godse
Soon after the BJP declared its first list of 195 candidates on March 2, Thakur tried to downplay the rebuff from her party by asserting that she remained a “committed soldier of the Sangh Parivar”, who will work to ensure that Narendra Modi “returns to power with a mandate of over 400 seats”. In the same breath, though, Thakur pinned the blame on the Opposition and the media for queering the pitch for her by “manipulating my statements to manufacture controversies” when she was asked if the BJP had benched her because of her lavish praise for Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse.
Thakur’s praise for Godse and her criticism of the Mahatma during and after her 2019 election campaign in Bhopal had triggered mass outrage. Modi had famously declared that he would “never be able to forgive her”. While Thakur continued courting controversies with provocative and bigoted statements over the course of her Lok Sabha stint, the denial of a ticket to her five years, after she made her electoral debut and trounced Congress veteran Digvijaya Singh by over 3.64 lakh votes has been painted in some sections of the press as Modi’s punishment to her for insulting Mahatma Gandhi.
Pragya's defiance
Yet, despite having lost the chance of returning to the Lok Sabha, Thakur has remained defiant over those comments. Though she admitted that the party may have benched her because “some of my words did not please the Prime Minister even though I had apologised for those remarks immediately” but she also asserted, without repeating those controversial statements, that “what I had said was the truth; I did not say anything that was controversial... even the public acknowledged the truth and I won my election with a massive margin”.
What has, however, stunned BJP leaders in MP more than Thakur’s defiance are her subsequent actions. The Bhopal MP, who on Monday (March 4) declared that she would “not speak to the media any more as it twists my words”, has trained her guns now at the BJP’s third-term MLA, Sudesh Rai, for allegedly running an “unlicensed and illegal liquor shop” in Khajuria Kalan village of Sehore town, which falls in the Bhopal Lok Sabha constituency.
Bulldozer justice
On Tuesday, Thakur led a group of girls to the liquor shop, with a local media crew in tow, and broke open the shop’s lock with a hammer. She lashed out at the local administration and police present at the spot, demanding to know “immediately” how permission to operate the liquor shop, situated opposite a school, had been granted to the BJP MLA. Then, in her own iteration of the bulldozer justice that BJP regimes in various states have been wantonly dispensing, Thakur directed the girls accompanying her to “pick up stones and break the shop down”.
While Rai, who has been winning the Sehore assembly seat since 2013 and owns multiple resorts and businesses, refused to comment on Thakur’s allegations, local BJP leaders told The Federal that the Sehore MLA was “collateral damage” in what was essentially the Bhopal MP’s “angry outburst at the party leadership”.
Upset BJP
A senior MP BJP leader said the party “had not anticipated such behaviour” from Thakur given that it was “clear to almost everyone for quite some time that she will not be given a ticket this time”.
One of the party’s MLAs from Bhopal also joked that “had Sadhvi Pragya spent some time touring her constituency in the past five years, the existence of that liquor shop would not have surprised her.” The MLA said: “I do not want to go into whether the shop has a valid license or not but the fact is that the shop has been around for some time... if she was actually so concerned about this, why did she not raise the issue with the government earlier”.
Another BJP leader from Sehore district told The Federal: “Sudesh Rai is a BJP MLA and his assembly seat falls within the Bhopal Lok Sabha constituency... all that she (Thakur) needed to do if she was so concerned about the shop running illegally was to call Rai and ask him to close it... Sudesh Rai owns hotels, resorts and other liquor shops that do brisk business, he is not financially dependent on that one shop... he would have voluntarily closed it if she had asked him to... fact is that Pragya Thakur cannot digest that her ticket has been cut but since she can’t lash out at those who denied her the ticket, she is creating trouble elsewhere”.
Thakur isn’t the only BJP leader in MP to use allegedly illegal liquor shops as a ruse to attack her own party after being sidelined by the leadership. Not long ago, former MP chief minister Uma Bharti, another ‘Sadhvi’ in the BJP fold who had also previously served as the Lok Sabha MP from Bhopal, had crossed swords with then chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on her demand to turn Madhya Pradesh into a prohibition state or, at least, to put in place a stringent excise policy.
Pushed to the fringe by the BJP’s central leadership, the once firebrand Bharti too was often seen hurling stones at liquor vends in the state and accusing Chouhan of patronising the liquor mafia. None of Bharti’s antics, however, helped her regain her prominence in the state’s politics or the BJP organisation. Following the BJP’s 2023 MP assembly poll triumph, Bharti has only been sidelined further.
Like Sadhvi Pragya, Bharti too is unlikely to make it to the list of BJP candidates in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls though she had, after opting out of contesting the last general elections, repeatedly asserted her desire to return to electoral politics this year.
Pragya’s replacement
Alok Sharma, who the BJP has now picked to wrest the Bhopal seat which the party has been winning since 1989, is yet to call upon Pragya Thakur. A close confidante of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who the BJP has fielded from the adjoining Vidisha Lok Sabha seat, Sharma told The Federal that he was “busy with pre-planned political engagements for the past few days” but would “definitely seek Sadhviji’s blessings for my campaign soon”.
Sharma’s candidature surprised many in the BJP’s Bhopal unit given that he had lost the December assembly polls from the Bhopal North assembly segment by a margin of over 25,000 votes to debutante Congress candidate Atif Aqueel. Yet, local BJP leaders claim that though Thakur may have taken a defiant stance, she would not dent the BJP’s prospects in Bhopal “even if she resorted to open rebellion” despite Sharma lacking the political heft that most previous BJP MPs from the constituency enjoyed.