We are deeply shocked by the statement of Ms. Pragya Thakur, the BJP candidate for the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, lauding Nathuram Godse the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi as a “deshbhakt”. This amounts to endorsing the murder of the Mahatma as an act of “deshbhakti” or patriotism. It is not enough for the BJP to distance itself from Ms.Thakur’s remarks, or to ask her to apologise. It is obvious that this is her position, no matter what she says to camouflage it for the time being.
What is equally shocking is the number of BJP functionaries who have come to defend Ms.Pragya Thakur’s remark. Unless the BJP leadership publicly apologizes for Ms.Thakur’s remark and takes punitive action against all those functionaries who are supporting her remark, the conclusion will be inescapable that we have a political party running the government today that does not believe in the anti-colonial struggle, in the values underlying the Constitution that came out of that struggle, and in the father of the nation that was forged in the course of that struggle.
Prabhat Patnaik
Vivan Sundaram
M.K. Raina
Irfan Habib
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Sohail Hashmi
Madangopal Singh
Ram Rahman
Zoya Hasan
D. N. Jha
C.P. Bhambri
Jayati Ghosh
C.P. Chandrasekhar
Geeta Kapur
Saeed Mirza
Sashi Kumar
Aban Raza
Abhilasha Kumari
Aditya Mukherjee
Ahmar Raza
Anil Sadgopal
Amar Farooqui
Anil Bhatti
Anil Chandra
Anuradha Kapur
Archana Prasad
Arjun Dev
Arpana Caur
Arunkumar H.G
Asghar Wajahat
Asmita Aasaavari
Atlury Murali
Badri Raina
Chanchal Chauhan
Praveen Jha
Pulin Nayak
Pushpamala N.
Qurban Ali
Radhika Menon
Rahul Verma
Raj Chauhan
Rajinder Arora
Rajiv Gupta
Rajni Arora
Ramakrishna Chatterjee
Rekha Awasthi
Rimli Bhattacharya
Ritambhara Shastri
Roop Rekha Verma
Saba Hasan
Sanjeev Kumar
Dinesh Abrol
Geetha Mehra
Shireen Moosvi
Indira Arjun Dev
Indira Chandrasekhar
Iqtidar Alam Khan
Jennifer Mirza
K. L. Tuteja
K. M. Shrimali
Keval Arora
Kumar Shahani
Lata Singh
M.M.P. Singh
Madhu Prasad
Maya John
Maya Krishna Rao
Mithu Sen
Mohan Rao
Mridula Mukherjee
N.K. Sharma
Nadeem Rezavi
Nilima Sheikh
Nina Rao
P.K. Shukla
Parthiv Shah
Shakti Kak
Sreelakshmi
Subir Sinha
Sudhir Chandra
Sukirat Anand
Sukumar Murlidharan
Sumangala Damodaran
Surendran Nair
Suvira Jaiswal
Tani Bhargava
V. Ramakrishna
Vasundhara Chauhan
Veer Munshi
Vikas Rawal
Vishwamohan Jha
Vertika Chaturvedi
