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Pragya Singh Thakur protests plea against candidacy
The father of one of the blast victims moved the court last Thursday, urging it to bar Thakur, who is contesting the election from Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Pragya Singh Thakur, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, on Tuesday termed an application seeking to stop her from contesting the Lok Sabha election “frivolous”, seeking its dismissal by a special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Mumbai.
The father of one of the blast victims moved the court last Thursday, urging it to bar Thakur, who is contesting the election from Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal. Thakur responded to the plea through her lawyer before the special judge for NIA cases, VS Padalkar. “The applicant has deliberately chosen this court to ventilate misconceived and frivolous application for want of publicity and for extraneous reasons with political agenda,” she said. She prayed the court to dismiss the application.
Responding to the same application, the NIA said ‘the matter pertains to elections and the Election Commission of India, NIA has no jurisdiction’, according to news agency ANI. On Monday, Thakur filed her nomination papers from Bhopal Lok Sabha constituency.
The application against Thakur was filed by Nisar Sayyad, who lost his son in the Malegaon blast. The applicant sought that Thakur, who is out on bail, be asked to attend court proceedings in Mumbai and barred from contesting the election as the trial is in progress. It further mentioned that Thakur got bail on health grounds. If she is “healthy enough to fight elections in the crippling summers heat”, then she has misled the court, the complainant alleged.
A petition seeking cancellation of her bail was pending before the Supreme Court, it said.
Six people were killed and over 100 injured in a bomb blast at Malegaon, a textile town in north Maharashtra’s Nashik district, on September 29, 2008.
The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Thakur and others in the case, alleging they were part of an extremist group which carried out the blast. The NIA later gave Thakur a clean chit, but the court did not discharge Thakur. It dropped charges against her under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, but she is still facing trial under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Indian Penal Code sections.
