Whether or not she deserved the sudden infamy thrust upon her, there is no doubt that the hitherto unknown Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur has split the BJP into those who seek validation from Karachi and Kansas, and those who seek legitimacy at Kurukshetra. 

Once BJP president Rajnath Singh decided to brush aside the waffling of Venkaiah Naidu and Ravi Shankar Prasad, and take up cudgels on behalf of the beleaguered Sadhvi and her alleged co-conspirators in the Malegaon blasts, matters should have been allowed to rest until the government actually came out with credible evidence against the feisty sanyasin. 

Mr. Rajnath Singh, who supported the Hindu agitation over land for Amarnath pilgrims, would have been aware that Sadhvi Pragya had shown impressive leadership at the time. She visited Jammu to attend the shanti sabha of the movement’s victims, offered solace to the families, and inspired the agitators to carry on the just struggle, as exhorted by Sri Krishna in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Amarnath was then the contemporary Kurukshetra of the Hindu Samaj, which is why young men from Punjab, Himachal, Haryana, and other places spontaneously rushed to Jammu, and the rest is history…

Mr. Singh, who was doubtless besieged by the Sadhvi’s admirers and colleagues, his own BJP and Parivar colleagues, and gauged Hindu sentiment in the matter of her arrest and villification via the media, rightly noted that after the sensation created by the arrest subsided, nothing emerged to substantiate the allegations. Hindus were enraged when the Maharashtra police declared its intention to subject the sanyasin to a narco-test - a modern-day medical voodoo masquerading as science – and it is shameful that the courts permitted the humiliation of a sanyasin. This ‘science’ is not so speedily accessed for all accused of jihad against the Indian state and people. 

Nor was narco-analysis done of the nun who alleged rape in Kandhamal following the premeditated murder of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati on Janmasthami (23 August). This is despite the fact that the lady is refusing to return to the State to identify her alleged culprits, but is freely addressing press conferences and issuing heavy duty statements against the State Police, which is hardly consistent with the mental profile of a supposedly traumatized person.  

Hence the BJP president was justified in charging that “an Arushi-like case” was being cooked up around Sadhvi Pragya. With no meaningful corroborative evidence, the Maharashtra Police’s decision to rush for a narco-test of the sanyasin – in stark contrast to its pussy-footing with Raj Thackeray – is proof that there is no real evidence to act upon! 

And now, to the eternal shame of the Mumbai Police, Sadhvi Pragya’s brain mapping test has reportedly shown that she was not lying during the forensic tests. Despite this, Police reportedly plans to subject her to further forensic tests, and it will be in the fitness of things if the BJP approaches the Supreme Court for the defamation of the Sadhvi and her harassment by the abuse of State power. The suit should be against the Maharashtra Government which has unleashed the most ugly form of tyranny against the Hindu community with this act of political vendetta, which is clearly aimed at harnessing the minority vote for the forthcoming Assembly elections in some States, as well as the national elections looming next year. 
 

Sadhvi Pragya has been a committed Hindu all her young life, joining the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and later the Durga Vahini, before answering a call to the saffron robe. Arrested now for allegedly plotting the 29 September bomb blast in the textile town of Malegaon (Maharashtra), which killed six people, she evokes comparisons with Samarth Ramdas who inspired Chhatrapati Shivaji to challenge the tyranny of Aurangzeb. It is the dharma of the sadhu (or sadhvi) to rally the king and the society to rise in the defence of Dharma; and the equation of Dharma with Adharma, of Justice with Crime, of Defence with Offense, is the fruit of Nehruvian India’s perverse adherence to a non-Dharma called Secularism. 

The Nehruvian Congress party, which dominates the coalition governments in New Delhi and Mumbai, and which has always sweated profusely at the sound of the word Savarkar, has also not lost time in trying to destroy the surviving legacy of those heroic brothers. Thus Sameer Kulkarni, a printing press employee in Bhopal, has been arrested in the same case – and the most damning evidence against him is that he happens to be the chief promoter of Abhinav Bharat, a radical Hindu organisation (sic), founded by Veer Savarkar in 1893! Dissolved in the 1950s, it was revived two years ago by the scions of the Godse-Savarkar families (kudos to them). 

The ‘know-how’ and RDX for the blasts – areas outside the competence of a sadhvi and a printing press worker – allegedly came from some serving and retired army men (Majors Prabhakar Kulkarni, Ramesh Upadhyay, Y.D. Sahasrabuddhe, and serving officer Lt Col Prasad Purohit). Here again, we find that the Bhonsala Military School at Nagpur where the now 85-year-old Kulkarni once served, is being targetted because it is managed by persons from the saffron fold (read RSS) and, way back in 2001, allowed the Bajrang Dal to hold a personality development camp on its premises! These guys could give Joseph McCarthy a complex. 

The Malegaon arrests were a call to Hindu manhood to stand up and be counted. Some did, and some didn’t. The man who found the virtue of secularism in the architect of the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946; tried to force India to send troops to fight the American war in Iraq; who supported while-pretending-to-oppose the scandalous Indo-US nuclear deal; who said nothing while P. Chidambaram gave the P-note route to unknown predators to take Rs. 13,000/- crores out of the Indian stock markets after the US meltdown began (SEBI admits Rs. 6500/- crores, but industry claims the higher figure); the Home Minister who twiddled his thumbs when Intelligence officers were thrashed within an inch of their lives while detecting SIMI activities in the capital, and refused to visit the victims of the 2001 Chhittisinghpura massacre when they were shifted to AIIMS; the man who offered green cards to illegal Bangla Muslims…

Even by these standards, it was a new low to find BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate L.K. Advani disowning the stately Sadhvi, and declaring that she should be punished if found guilty. The former Home Minister should know that regardless of his platitudes, the law will take its own course, and that regardless of any outcome, Sadhvi Pragya and her co-accused have an enhanced status in the eyes of the community; he has emerged as the proverbial Mir Jaffar. This has been accentuated by inspired media reports that his views will prevail in the party, not those of the party president. In other words, the decision to abandon Hindu revolutionaries allegedly reacting to the murder and mayhem in the country, was something the Naqli Sardar had undertaken with deliberate intent. 

As he struggles to impose his writ upon an increasingly restive party, Mr. Advani should ask himself why the Sri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti told him to cancel his trip to Jammu earlier this year. It was because, given the betrayal at Ayodhya, ignited Hindus did not want him to come and make a statement that would defuse the movement without securing the land. It was a prescient move.

He should also ask himself – or his wily advisers – why every yatra undertaken after the Ram yatra has had to be abandoned without completion. Because he has been disowned by Sri Ram. His stranglehold on the BJP and sections of the RSS is reminiscent of the losing Ravana’s unrelenting grip over Lanka. 

Meanwhile, the nation owes a debt of gratitude to the aging tiger, Bal Thackeray, for asking the Hindu community to come forward to provide legal defence to Sadhvi Pragya and her co-accused. He can rest assured that the funds will pour in if he only directs us where to send our contributions.

Blasting the degenerates who support Afzal Guru, convicted for the attack on the Indian Parliament, the Shiv Sena chief has drawn a sharp distinction between the constant jihad by Islamic terrorists who plant bombs with impunity virtually every day – the Assam bloodbath being only the latest instance – and the possible reaction to the same by Hindus “born in the present milieu.” This contextualization of the crime by the alleged accused is heart-warming after the snivelling, whimpering, distancing of the Advani faction, which looks to Karachi and Kansas for political legitimacy, unmindful of the fact that there has been a fundamental shift in the nation’s template. Those who will not pick up arms at Kurukshetra are doomed to failure. 

Sadhvi Pragya and her associates are like the innocent Abhimanyu, cornered in a chakravyu created to appease Muslim voters in the run-up to the myriad elections over the next few months. Today, Hindu society is Arjun – and the way to break the chakravyu is to defeat each and every politician (across party lines) who is seen to be inimical to the interests and sensitivities of the Hindu people and the Hindu nation. The rest will take care of itself. 

The author is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com