Politics in India has always had a deep relationship with religion,” said BJP President Rajnath Singh at the Sangh Parivar conclave in Panipat, claiming that the BJP would defend Pragya Singh Thakur and Lieutenant-Colonel Shrikant Purohit, who have been “maligned” for allegedly engineering the Malegaon blasts. He claimed that the investigations were politically motivated, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was “mentally unstable” on occasion, and that the very concept of “Hindu terrorism” was “sheer madness”.

The bottom slid out of the BJP’s anti-terror rhetoric when the Mumbai Anti-Terrorism Squad implicated Thakur and Purohit in the bomb blasts — a party which routinely lambasted the UPA government for its sissy, minority-coddling approach to terrorism found itself weakly mumbling that terrorism should not be identified with any particular community, and that “saints and seers” like Thakur should not be “stripped of their dignity” before charges are conclusively proved. Remember that the BJP’s pride and joy, the bright sparks of its youth wing, only last week spat on the face of a Delhi University teacher who has long been acquitted of involvement in a terrorist attack. Fair’s fair,

Mr Singh. If you acknowledge that the instinct for terror is not hardwired into any religion, then “Hindu” militancy must be rooted out with the same ruthless determination that you expect from the UPA government in matters of “Muslim” terrorist involvement. To play petty partisan politics over anti-terror investigations at this point will ensure that impartial probes will be impossible in India. Just as the Batla House encounter was shrouded in a miasma of allegation and counter-allegation, the BJP casting Thakur as a persecuted pilgrim or Purohit as an upstanding officer before the slightest scrap of evidence either way shows profound disrespect for our investigative agencies. To label all inconvenient truths “political conspiracies” strips these institutions of their dignity and credibility.

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