Pragya was a former member of the national executive of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the RSS.

Pictures of the sadhvi with BJP President Rajnath Singh and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan were in circulation in Bhopal and Indore. The event: a condolence meeting after the death of state Education Minister Laxman Gaur in February 2006.

Speaking to The Sunday Express today, Gaur’s wife Malini Gaur, who is a strong BJP contender for the Indore -4 Assembly seat after her husband’s death, said: “Sadhvi Pragya Singh was one of the several friends invited by my husband to a yagya in January this year. That was when I met her. She was also there after his death. I don’t know who has issued the picture. It’s a political conspiracy.”

Said Mukesh Jain, who served as personal assistant to Laxman Gaur: “It could be an insider’s job by someone from within the BJP or someone from a rival party.”

Chief Minister Chouhan said he wouldn’t comment “since investigations were on in the matter”. Asked about sharing the stage with her, he said: “Where’s the question of disowning anyone when all the 6.5 crore inhabitants of Madhya Pradesh are part of my family?”

While Rajnath was not willing to comment, leaders close to him said “a party president could not be held responsible for who sits alongside him”. The sadhvi’s role in the blasts has not been proved yet, they added.

In Gujarat, Bajrang Dal chief Ranchhod Bharwad toed the Sangh line already spelt out by RSS Sanghchalak (North) Bajranglal Gupta on Friday. “No Hindu can ever be an extremist,” he said. He denied her father’s claim that she had campaigned for the BJP in the Gujarat elections in 2002 after the riots. “We never heard of it,” he said.

Gujarat BJP chief Purushottam Rupala said: “I don’t know her at all,” he said.

Even Gujarat VHP president Dilip Trivedi said he didn’t know the sadhvi.

Former ABVP national president Rajkumar Bhatia, however, stood by Pragya, asserting that “she was a good worker”. “If at all she’s involved in terror attacks, it only shows that her emotions overtook her sense of proportion. Also, what she might have done after leaving the organisation cannot be the ABVP’s responsibility,” said Bhatia, considered extremely close the Sangh Parivar.

Pragya began her ABVP life in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind before moving on to Ujjain where she worked as a “vistarak” (full-time worker engaged in expanding the party work).

Pragya founded “Jai Vande Mataram,” an organisation devoted to the “cause of women’s empowerment and Hindutva ideology”. After coming in contact with Haridwar’s Swami Awadheshanand, she turned an ascetic.

Former RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav said that any credible evidence on the Sadhvi’s role in the terror strikes “was yet to be established”, Bajrang Dal founder-president and now BJP general secretary Vinay Katiyar said the present controversy was “a Congress attempt to present a counter to the Batla House shootout.”

“How can terror be linked to a particular religion? They have now invented the term Hindu terrorism, but what about the Naxalites, majority of whom happen to be Hindus? While law must take its own course, we would be forced to launch an agitation if they go around implicating religious figures like this,” said Katiyar.

Said BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad: “There’s a compensatory policing going around which has its own political agenda. However, law must take its own course and the guilty must be brought to book. We reject the charge of Hindu terrorism as we have always believed that terror has no religion.”

(with D P Bhattacharya, Ahmedabad)