New Delhi: In what was touted as among the biggest battles of this Lok Sabha election, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s controversial candidate Pragya Singh Thakur seems all set to win the prestigious Bhopal seat, pipping her rival and two-time Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh.
According to the trends at 11:45 am, Thakur is leading by margin of over 40,000 votes, leaving senior Congress leader Singh far behind.
Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts case, joined the BJP just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections and was propped up as a surprise candidate from Bhopal — a seat the BJP has not lost since 1989.
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The battle
Bhopal was a carefully calibrated but risky gamble by the BJP, which seems to be paying off. Singh had been at the forefront of promoting the phrase “saffron terror”, which Thakur has been accused of.
The BJP pit her against Singh, hoping it would provoke him to make statements against her that might further help polarise votes in her favour.
However, the battle turned interesting when Singh chose not to attack his opponent at all and, in fact, played the game BJP falls back upon — Hindutva. Bhopal, thus, became about the ‘Hindu’ Singh — who visited over 100 temples — versus a saffron-clad and self-proclaimed ‘sadhvi’ in Thakur.
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The BJP candidate actually caused embarrassment to her party with her loose statements, especially against former Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare, as well when she called Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse “a patriot”. However, the party’s top leadership reined her in just in time, preventing any serious damage.
The seat
As mentioned before, the BJP has not lost Bhopal since 1989. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, BJP’s Alok Sengar had won here by a margin of over 3.7 lakh votes.
This is also a seat where Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address any rally, despite it being key for the BJP. A highly-placed source in the party says there was “confidence” the BJP would win this seat and hence, “it was decided against wasting the PM’s limited time here”.
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