Pragya Thakur's candidature shows BJP will pursue aggressive Hindutva

For years, the BJP plied its Hindutva trade from behind the fig leaf of hypocrisy, aptly summed by its 2014 slogan, sabka saath sabka vikas (support and development for everyone). With Sadhvi Pragya Thakur’s candidature from Bhopal, the BJP has thrown off even that flimsy cover, revealing the ugly, divisive and communal underbelly of its politics.

Thakur’s candidature isn’t a small event in Indian politics. For the first time in India’s history, a mainstream party has named a person out on bail after spending nine months in jail on charges of plotting bomb blasts and terror attacks as its candidate for a parliamentary seat. By choosing her, the BJP has shown that it has zero respect for political morality or shuchita, a word it used to peddle till recently.

To understand the magnitude of its decision, consider the parallel. What if some other mainstream party had given its ticket to a person accused of plotting terror attacks in some part of north India? Abdul Subhan Qureshi, aka Tauqeer, the alleged mastermind of the series of blasts claimed by Indian Mujahidin a few years ago?

Thakur is facing multiple charges of planning and assisting in terror attacks and murder. Though she is railing against the Congress, calling herself a victim of the opposition’s conspiracies, she was first arrested by the Madhya Pradesh police under the then BJP government on charges of RSS activist Sunil Joshi’s murder. The murder case was later closed and reopened by the MP police. In 2017, a district court in MP acquitted Thakur and all other accused of murder and criminal conspiracy.

Thakur’s real claim to fame is spending nine years in jail for her alleged role in the 2008 Malegaon blasts that killed six persons. Her name figures in investigations into several other terror attacks allegedly by Hindu extremists. She is currently out on bail.

Why has the BJP fielded such a controversial candidate? The answer lies in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election speech on April 1 in Maharashtra where he claimed the Congress had disrespected Hindus by coining the term ‘Hindu terror.’ He had then asked the electorate to punish the Congress for this.

The BJP wants to fight the election on a communal agenda and in Thakur it has found the ideal symbol of ‘Hindu victimhood.’ She wears saffron clothes; is accused of terrorism but against Muslims, which for many is a badge of honour since the act is targeted against the rival community; she has a tale of torture and atrocities to narrate on the campaign trail and has a personal-cum-ideological axe to grind against Digvijay Singh, her rival in Bhopal.

Singh has been a vocal critic of Hindu extremism and is widely perceived as a practitioner of minority appeasement. In a city like Bhopal, where there is a sizable number of Muslims, the BJP feels the optics of a victimised Hindu ascetic taking on a champion of minority rights could become the selling point of its identity politics.

Bhopal has been a BJP bastion since 1989. Even under normal circumstances, in an election where religious identities were not played up, its voters elected the BJP candidate. But, the BJP has chosen Thakur with the specific intention of turning her into an emotive issue, presenting her as a symbol of Hindu pride and raising the bogey of threat to the Indian majority from its minorities.

Till a few years ago, the BJP pursued the politics of polarisation with a bit of finesse. Its leaders, though votaries of Hindutva, always kept hardliners like Praveen Togadia and Sadhvi Rithambhara on the fringe — thus the term ‘lunatic fringe.’ In addition, it kept up the facade of being a party of the Indians, not just Hindus, with its politics of tokenism by projecting some Muslim faces and talking about the minorities here and there. Under Modi and Amit Shah, the fringe has gradually become the mainstream and the attempts to seek votes in the name of Hindutva start right at the top.

You can argue that when it comes to elections, the law is very clear: Only persons convicted by a court are ineligible to contest. But the charges against Thakur are extremely serious and the courts have refused to let Thakur off the hook in spite of the national investigation agency’s attempts to get her name dropped from the Malegaon chargesheet. In the past, Modi and Shah had harassed the Congress for accepting the leadership of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi, both of whom are out on bail in the National Herald case. Its supporters have been railing against former JNU president Kanhaiya Kumar by calling him an anti-national, part of the tukde-tukde gang merely on the basis of charges that have not even been presented before a court. By picking up an alleged terrorist out on bail, the BJP has only underlined its opportunism and hypocrisy and its intentions to hard sell Hindutva without any shame or moral restraint.