[The 49-year-old is an unlikely legislator. She renounced family life in her 30s to become a “sadhvi,” an honorific for a Hindu nun. But later she would be charged under an anti-terrorism statute for conspiring to target Muslims in a deadly 2008 bomb blast. She denies the charges.]
By
Niha Masih
 |
|
Pragya Singh Thakur
(center) is welcomed during a rally before filing her
nomination in the parliamentary
elections in Bhopal in April.
(Gagan Nayar/AFP/Getty Images)
|
BHOPAL, India — Pragya Singh Thakur is a Hindu ascetic who
has boasted of her role in destroying a medieval mosque, valorized the man who
murdered Mohandas Gandhi as a “patriot” and is facing trial on a charge of
terrorist conspiracy.
Last month, she was also elected to India’s
Parliament.
Thakur is the most-talked about candidate to
win in the recently concluded national polls, which returned Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to power with a massive
mandate.
The 49-year-old is an unlikely legislator.
She renounced family life in her 30s to become a “sadhvi,” an honorific for a
Hindu nun. But later she would be charged under an anti-terrorism statute for
conspiring to target Muslims in a deadly 2008 bomb blast. She denies the
charges.
Her controversial candidacy and comfortable
victory epitomize the growing influence of a militant brand of right-wing Hindu
ideology in India, a country of more than 1.3 billion people that its founders
envisioned as a secular republic.
The decision by the senior leadership of the
BJP to tap Thakur to run in the party stronghold of Bhopal, the capital of the
state of Madhya Pradesh, shocked even its sympathizers.
Thakur is the “worst example of poisonous,
hate-infused” belief in Hindu primacy, wrote Tavleen Singh, a columnist who
admires Modi, in the Indian Express newspaper. There is “no excuse” for Modi to
allow people charged with terrorism to contest polls, Singh wrote.
A total of 159 newly elected Indian
legislators have faced serious criminal charges, an increase of 109 percent
since the 2009 elections. But experts on the country’s elections said no major
party had fielded a candidate charged under a terrorism statute in decades.
Thakur's run for office sent a "national
signal," said political scientist Tariq Thachil of Vanderbilt University,
who studies grass-roots politics in Bhopal. During the election campaign, Modi
combined a muscular stance on national security with a pro-development agenda.
At the same time, the BJP also provided a platform for fringe candidates like
Thakur whose rhetoric stokes tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
During the campaign, she described the
election as a “religious war” and asked people to dedicate their vote to
religion. She received more than 860,000 votes.
According to Thakur’s brother-in-law, she is
the second of five siblings and was born and raised in Bhind, a small town in
central India. Her father was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or
RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization that is the ideological parent of the
BJP. She majored in history and spent several years working with the student
wing of the RSS.
In September 2008, a bomb on a motorbike
exploded outside a mosque in Malegaon, a city in western India, killing six
people and injuring more than 100. The motorbike was registered in Thakur’s
name. She was also accused by police of attending a meeting to plot the attack,
charges she denies. Thakur spent over eight years in jail before securing bail.
The national investigating agency that took
over the probe from the police said the evidence against her was not
substantiated, but the court disagreed. Her trial began in December and is
ongoing.
J.P. Mishra, Thakur’s lawyer, said there is
“not a single piece of evidence” against her. He said the bike had not been in
her possession for two years before the blast. Avinash Rasal, the government
prosecutor in the case, said that witness testimonies would be crucial to the
case.
Her political career does not appear to have
been damaged by the trial.
One recent Sunday morning, several dozen of
her new constituents gathered at her rented home in Bhopal. Around 9:30 a.m.,
Thakur came down the stairs in flowing saffron robes. Everyone got up
reverentially. She walked to a corner of the room and bowed in front of a set
of framed images. Some were portraits of Hindu gods. One was a portrait of her.
Thakur declined a request for an interview,
telling a Washington Post reporter that her focus was now her work. Many of the
visitors prostrated themselves at her feet and then took selfies. She responded
with a smile and placed her hands on their heads in a gesture of blessing.
One of those present was Anjali Chauhan, 20,
a recent graduate who hoped to work with Thakur for the “upliftment of Hindus.”
Chauhan said she did not know much about the terrorism case against Thakur and
said it was likely she had been framed.
Other voters in Bhopal said they cast their
vote for the BJP rather than for Thakur. “If the party has fielded her, then we
have to go with it,” said Aditi Saxena, a psychologist in the city. “I was
willing to overlook her past.”
But some of Thakur’s statements on the
campaign trail did give Saxena pause. In one instance, Thakur claimed that by
cursing a decorated police officer, she had caused his death. (The officer was
killed in the line of duty trying to stop a terrorist attack.) Thakur had
earlier accused the officer of torturing her while she was in jail, but an
investigation by a human rights commission found the allegations were “not
substantiated.”
Cursing an officer whom many Indians consider
a hero was not Thakur’s most inflammatory remark during the campaign. That
moment came when she praised Gandhi’s assassin, a Hindu extremist named
Nathuram Godse who believed that the revered independence leader had betrayed
Hindus in the negotiations over Indian independence and the creation of
Pakistan. Godse “was, is and will remain a patriot,” Thakur said on the
campaign trail.
In the ensuing furor, the BJP promised
disciplinary action against Thakur, and Modi said he could never forgive the
remark. But no official action has been taken. A BJP spokesman did not respond
to a request for comment.
Five days after the election results were
announced, Thakur delivered an address at a public event in a suburb of Delhi
organized by a group of army veterans.
Her speech included flattering references to
her life, about which little is known. She said that as a teenager, she jumped
from her rooftop in the middle of the night to catch a thief, whom she beat up
and handed over to the police — a story she presented as evidence of her early
interest in the good of the nation.
“God gave me the strength to live for the
country,” she said, exhorting the crowd to become “soldiers” for the saffron
cause.
Saffron is the color worn by Hindu ascetics
as well as the color of the BJP. Thakur said that saffron-wearing nationalists
now inspire fear, a development she viewed with approval.
“I
like it,” she said. “If enemies aren’t scared, we should know how to scare
them.”
Read more
