Was fielding Sadhvi Pragya Singh, BJP’s biggest blunder?

The 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign has set many alarming precedents. Fielding a candidate accused of terrorism is the latest one among them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fielded Sadhvi Pragya Singh, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast, as its nominee from the Bhopal Lok Sabha constituency in Madhya Pradesh against former Congress Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh.

Pragya's campaign had a bumpy start. She joined BJP in Bhopal in the morning of April 17 and in the afternoon she was declared as the party's candidate for Bhopal constituency. She had earlier made some obnoxious remarks about Chief of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) Hemant Karkare and said that she had put a curse on Karkare seeking his total destruction and five weeks later he was killed. Recently Sadhvi Pragya Singh had made yet another controversial comment that Godse was the "first terrorist of free India". Thakur said, "Nathuram Godse ek deshbhakt the, hain aur rahenge (Nathuram Godse was a patriot, is a patriot, and will always remain one)."

Moreover, the BJP has chosen to field a terror-tainted candidate at a time when the party is running a shrill campaign on the issue of national security. Was this BJP's biggest blunder by fielding terror-accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh from Bhopal?