Bhopal: Conspicuous by her absence in the run-up to assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Pragya Singh Thakur said she is ready to contest the general election if instructed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central leadership. Thakur, however, added that she won’t approach the leadership in Delhi to ask for a ticket to retain the seat she first won in 2019.
In an exclusive interview with ThePrint, the MP from Bhopal said the BJP top brass agreed to keep her off the campaign trail in MP to allow her to focus on her court case. She is an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case.
“The case is being heard regularly and there are daily hearings as it is a fast track court. It is now at the stage where my statement has to be recorded and I cannot ignore the court order,” she said.
Thakur added that though the BJP is a big party and the absence of one person will not make any difference, it was her “duty to be there (on the campaign trail) but it was also important to give priority to the court”.
Asked if she would seek a ticket for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, Pragya Singh Thakur told ThePrint, “I am completely devoted to the organisation and whatever they will decide for me, it will be the final decision.”
She added, “I think, when I had contested the elections (2019 Lok Sabha polls), I did not have to go and keep my side of the story. It was the organisation that asked me to contest the elections. If the organisation says you have to contest elections in the future, I will contest. If I am asked to not contest the elections, I will not contest elections. When there is complete dedication, there is no room for any other questions to arise.”
Referring to her tenure as the BJP MP from Bhopal, Thakur said she always raised the voice of her constituents in Parliament. She had defeated Congress veteran and former chief minister Digvijaya Singh by a margin of nearly 3.4 lakh votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
“Whatever commitments we (BJP) made, our then CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan fulfilled it…I just know that whatever time I got from the party, I utilised it for the betterment of the people and I gave my everything.”
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Pragya Singh Thakur’s run-ins with controversy
Since her induction into the BJP in April 2019, Thakur courted controversy on more than one occasion with her remarks. For instance, less than a month after she joined the BJP, Thakur while speaking at a public meeting referred to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse as a “patriot”.
She later withdrew the statement, only to repeat it in November of that year on the floor of the Lok Sabha for which she later tendered an apology.
In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Thakur also whipped up a storm when she compared former Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare to ‘Kans’ and ‘Ravana’. She also said that the Ashok Chakra awardee fell to bullets during the 26/11 attacks because he was “cursed” for arresting her in the 2008 Malegaon blast case.
The BJP had then distanced itself from Thakur, maintaining that this was her personal opinion. Thakur also received a show-cause notice from the Election Commission of India (ECI) and later withdrew her remarks. The poll panel also barred her from campaigning for three days and ordered the registration of an FIR against her after she boasted of having climbed atop the Babri Masjid in 1992 and playing a role in its demolition.
In December 2020, she kicked up a storm yet again when she told a gathering of the Kshatriya Mahasabha in Sehore that shudras “are offended” when referred to by their caste due to “ignorance” of “our dharmashastra (social treatise)” on their part.
And in May 2021, she told BJP workers in Bhopal that drinking cow urine “purifies the lungs and saves me from Covid-19 infection”.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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