BJP’s move to field Pragya Thakur in Bhopal underlines an ominous political paradigm shift | The Indian Express

BJP’s move to field Pragya Thakur in Bhopal underlines an ominous political paradigm shift | The Indian Express

By Editorial |Written by Christophe Jaffrelot, Malvika Maheshwari |Updated: May 11, 2019 7:18:55 am

Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  He offers valuable insights on South Asian politics, particularly the methods and motivations of the Hindu right in India.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at Ashoka University.

BJP’s move to field Pragya Thakur in Bhopal underlines an ominous political paradigm shift

How do we explain the shift in democratic politics when those arrested on charges of terrorism and out on bail are now beginning to contest elections? What sort of a moral force are they able to wield?

Thakur’s campaign has claimed that her fight is against the “conspiracy to insult Hindu religion,” against those who “give a bad name to the entire country,” who “insult(ed) a woman, a sadhvi, and a patriot,” who put her in jail “illegally and tortured (her) physically, mentally and in every way”. (Source: PTI/File)

Democracy, while a robust political form, is one whose actual mechanisms might not necessarily be about principle-driven behaviour or perfection of governance. High levels of corruption, political violence, the entry of criminals into Parliament, are examples pertinent to many democracies today. In India, mafia leaders and those accused of gruesome crimes have chosen to contest elections with the aim of converting their catalogue of criminality into something more respectable.