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.”

... contd.