Close on the heels of Congress announcing the name of Digvijaya Singh for the crucial Bhopal seat, it has been suggested in certain quarters that BJP should field Sadhvi Pragya against the former Chief Minister.
Mr Singh has been two-time Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh between 1993 and 2003 and once out of the state politics – he had moved to the central politics and for sometime even played the role of an effective political guide to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Talking to a private TV channel, Sadhvi Pragya, who was arrested in connection with the 2008 western India bombings in Malegaon but later acquitted, did not rule out the possibility of her contest.
“Desh ka dushman, mera dushman …..(The country’s enemy is my enemy),” she remarked but hastened to add that no proper and formal offer has come yet from the BJP to field her from Bhopal.
The parliamentary constituency of Bhopal has been a saffron party bastion for long. In fact, the BJP has been winning the seat continuously for eight time since 1989.
It was only in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi that the Congress nominee K N Pradhan had won the seat.
Besides Bhopal, there are several constituencies seats such as Indore, Bhind, Vidisha and Damoh those have eluded Congress for years and remained with the saffron outfit.
In 2014, the Congress had won only two out of the 29 Lok Sabha seats when Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia could retain their seats.
Sadhvi Pragya maintained she had no personal grudge against anyone but it will only in the interest of the nation that she has to come forward to fight elections against Digvijaya Singh “if necessary”.
“The Congress leaders – Sushilkumar Shinde, Digvijaya Singh and P Chidambaram – will pay for their sins,” Sadhvi Pragya had said last year, stating that she was ‘framed’ in the Malegaon blast case.
