india

Updated: May 18, 2019 07:06 IST

Hours after the BJP distanced itself from Pragya Singh Thakur’s comment calling Nathuram Godse a patriot and asked her to apologise, party president Amit Shah defended her candidature on Friday saying that it was a ‘satyagraha’ against a fake case of Bhagwa terror.

Amit Shah was addressing the media at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi after wrapping up campaigning for the ongoing general elections. He was accompanied by prime minister Narendra Modi, who attended a press meet for the first time in five years during his tenure as PM.

“I want to ask the Congress, some people were earlier arrested in the ‘Samjhauta Express’ case who were related to the LeT. A fake case of ‘bhagwa terror’ was registered in which the accused have since been acquitted,” Shah said.

Ticked off by the BJP for calling Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse a ‘patriot’, Pragya Singh Thakur was asked by the party to apologise and submit an explanation to the disciplinary committee within 10 days.

On Friday, in a series of tweets, Amit Shah distanced the party from the comments made by Pragya Singh Thakur and two other BJP leaders. “The comments made by Ananth Kumar Hegde, Pragya Singh Thakur and Nalin Kateel in the past two days are personal. The Bharatiya Janata Party has no connection with their comments,” Shah said.

Although she did apologise, Pragya Singh Thakur, in turn has blamed the media for twisting her comments regarding Godse out of context.

The BJP candidate from the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, Thakur is an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, in which her motorcycle was allegedly used to plant bombs that killed six people and injured several others .After her candidature was announced in April, Pragya Singh Thakur has been involved in one controversy after another for her rash comments on former ATS chief Hemant Karkare and more recently on Godse.