Prime Minister Narendra Modi has devalued the country’s highest national honour, the Bharat Ratna, by the manner in which he has sought to award it in the last months of his 10-year tenure. He is not the first PM, to be sure, to have politicised a national honour. However, with his weekly announcements in the run-up to an election, he has made the politicisation blatant.
Consider the five persons named week after week in this past month — Karpoori Thakur, Lal Krishna Advani, Charan Singh, P V Narasimha Rao and M S Swaminathan. If they were all regarded as worthy of the honour, they could all have been named on the very first Republic Day of the Modi government in 2015. After all, the achievements they are credited with go a long way back. In any case, all five names could have been announced on the eve of this year’s Republic Day. Given the manner in which these names have been announced, it is possible there could be more names in the pre-election pipeline. Why not a Bharat Ratna to Biju Patnaik, N T Rama Rao, H D Deve Gowda and J Jayalalithaa — all leaders of political parties that are potential allies?
Naming Narasimha Rao now and not during the year of his birth centenary in 2021, when the Telangana state legislature unanimously passed a resolution seeking the honour for Telangana’s tallest political leader and a PM who made history turning India and the Indian economy around, smacks of political opportunism. In 2021, the electoral dividend would have been marginal. Today, it is perhaps hoped there would be more, as with Karpoori Thakur and Charan Singh.
India has had many PMs but all have not made history. If Jawaharlal Nehru deserved his Ratna as India’s first PM and Indira Gandhi for the creation of Bangladesh, Narasimha Rao had no option but to name Rajiv Gandhi, but he himself richly deserved the honour. It was Rao’s political leadership of India’s economic turnaround and subsequent rise that laid the foundations of a truly New and Rising India. He has had to wait for 33 years after 1991 to secure this national honour. For his part, Prime Minister Rao was the only PM to name an industrialist as Bharat Ratna when he named J R D Tata in January 1992. JRD’s choice was significant not only because he was the first and only business leader to be so honoured but also because it was New Delhi’s policy signal to Bombay in the wake of Rao’s “New Economic Policies” and the liberalisation of the economy. His other two choices were Maulana Azad and Satyajit Ray.
The Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour, is the one award that the President and Prime Minister have the power to personally name an individual for. There is a procedure for the selection of all other Padma awardees. A group of officials and non-officials, the latter being regarded as “reliable” by the government of the day, sit for days to put together a list of all Padma awardees. The President and PM can suggest names to this committee of officials before their list is forwarded to the PM for approval and subsequent forwarding to the President. This procedure has been made more elaborate over the past decade with the public at large being invited to name a person for a Padma “through proper channel”.
There have been instances when the President took the initiative to select a name for the highest honour. The first such case was when in 1955 President Rajendra Prasad chose to name Prime Minister Nehru. Some may well argue that it was President Prasad who first politicised the award by naming an incumbent PM. Incidentally, since the announcement of the award and its handing over is by the Rashtrapati, Prasad had to wait till he was no longer Rashtrapati for Prime Minister Nehru to name him.
Nehru himself set a good precedent by giving the first few awards to persons of scholarship, barring the very first one to C Rajagopalachari. Nehru’s jewels were physicist C V Raman, engineer M Visvesvaraya, Indologist P V Kane, educationist, social reformer and fighter for women’s rights D G Karve, Gandhian P D Tandon and the philosopher S Radhakrishnan. The first overt politicisation of the honour that raised eyebrows was the naming of President V V Giri by Indira Gandhi in 1975. He was a prominent labour leader before becoming President but one could argue he was not in the same category of eminence as the first 10 awardees.
Perhaps the first time the Bharat Ratna became purely political was when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi honoured her former party President and Congress Party leader from Tamil Nadu, K Kamaraj. Kamaraj was undoubtedly a popular politician and a genial person, but his greater contribution was to his party rather than the country. Indira Gandhi redeemed herself in her second term naming Mother Teresa and the Gandhian Acharya Vinoba Bhave. After her, Rajiv Gandhi blotted the record further naming M G Ramachandran posthumously.
While Modi is not the first PM to politicise the Bharat Ratna, in recent years his predecessors have tried to salvage the honour’s reputation. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made stellar choices naming M S Subbulakshmi, C Subramaniam, Jayaprakash Narayan, Amartya Sen, Gopinath Bordoloi, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Lata Mangeshkar and Ustad Bismillah Khan. Both Vajpayee and Rao steered clear of naming politicians for political benefit. Manmohan Singh followed their example, naming Bhimsen Joshi, Sachin Tendulkar and scientist C N R Rao.
Short-term PMs like Chandrashekhar used the opportunity to correct certain political distortions naming B R Ambedkar and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel posthumously. His decision to name Morarji Desai can be contested, but that of naming Nelson Mandela, the only non-Indian to be so honoured, was a wise one. That Patel and Ambedkar had to wait so long also underscores the politicisation of the honour. For all his pretensions to be different, Modi has been no different than the Gandhis in choosing his Bharat Ratnas. While Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya were great citizens deserving of the honour, and Bhupen Hazarika was a great artiste, Nanaji Deshmukh and Pranab Mukherjee were questionable political choices.
The writer was member, National Security Advisory Board (1999-2001) and Advisor to the Prime Minister of India
