New Delhi, May 17; GANASHAKTI: Among hundreds academicians, intellectuals, cultural activists etc jointly issued the following statement:
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.
