As the Sangh Parivar debates how to handle its “association” with Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, the former ABVP activist under investigation in the Malegaon and Modasa blasts, her family’s past could leave other parties hot under the collar.

Chandrapal Singh Thakur, Sadhvi’s father and an ayurvedic doctor, has told 'The Indian Express' that he was a long-time Congress grassroot worker and revered Indira Gandhi until the Emergency. He says the “excesses” at that time drove him towards the RSS.

Thakur claims that when the Digvijay Singh government was in power in Madhya Pradesh, the state Deputy Home Minister Govind Singh, “a friend”, had offered Pragya the job of a government teacher in Bhind. She refused, says the father.

Pragya was picked up from Surat by the Mumbai ATS. Thakur says so far he hasn’t approached anyone for help: “I have not contacted anybody.” According to him, Pragya’s Jai Vande Matram’s main target were women. She would “rescue girls who eloped with boys of another community, sometimes bring them back to their parents.”

“These girls were remarried to suitable Hindu boys and the outfit would bear the expenditure,” he says.

Of his days in the Congress, Thakur says it was Indira Gandhi and her ideology that attracted him to the party as a worker in Bhind. “At that time I was 30. The party office gave us literature containing the views of Indira Gandhi. There was one thing common: she hated the RSS, its working style and ideology. Later, even I hated them. During that time the RSS was also active in our Lehar village in Bhind district.”

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