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Journalism of Courage
By conferring Bharat Ratna first on Karpoori Thakur and L K Advani, and now on former prime ministers P V Narasimha Rao and Choudhary Charan Singh, and agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan, it is evident that Narendra Modi will present a mantra including Mandal, Mandir, Market and Mandi (farmers) in the Big Battle of 2024 – taking a leaf out of the book of many a leader before him, but giving it a Modi touch.
Three of the leaders honoured by the Modi government are from the Opposition ranks – Bharatiya Lok Dal (now Rashtriya Lok Dal or RLD) leader Charan Singh, socialist ideologue Karpoori Thakur, and Rao, the first non-Gandhi family leader of the Congress to complete a term as PM. The BJP under Modi has been co-opting leaders from outside the party and adding them to its pantheon, whether Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel or Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose earlier, and these personalities now.
Swaminathan, the Father of the Green Revolution, is associated with Indira Gandhi. She initiated the process towards self-reliance on food production after she went to the US soon after becoming PM in 1966, and American headlines greeted her with ‘An Indian PM comes with a begging bowl’.
Mandal in the Modi Mantra stands for the importance given to OBCs under his government, with the PM himself an OBC. Karpoori Thakur and Charan Singh both belonged to backward classes, with Thakur really the father of the Mandal phenomenon. As chief minister of Bihar in 1978, he introduced 26% reservation for OBCs in government jobs, and when the decision was met with violent protests, he decided to set aside 3% for the EWS (economically weaker sections) and another 3% for women – a harbinger of things to come in later years.
A Bharat Ratna to Thakur also gave a fig leaf to his protege and JD(U) supremo Nitish Kumar to walk back into the BJP fold. The Bihar CM claimed he had written to successive governments at the Centre to give the socialist icon the country’s highest civilian award, and that it was the Modi government that finally did it.
The reaction of RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary was along the same lines, reacting to the Bharat Ratna to his grandfather Charan Singh with the remark, “Dil Jeet Liya (Won hearts!)”. This comes amidst talk of the RLD and BJP almost concluding their talks on an alliance, with the RLD getting at least two Lok Sabha seats and one in the Rajya Sabha.
With Charan Singh, Modi covered the ‘Mandi’ gap. The BJP has been worried about the disaffection among farmers, particularly Jats, in western Uttar Pradesh, and hopes that the entry of RLD – carrying the legacy of farmer leader Charan Singh – may stem that. West UP accounts for 29 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Charan Singh was responsible for the downfall of the Congress in UP, amidst the rise of the OBCs, and was as much a leader of the Yadavs as Jats.
The late Jaipal Reddy, a minister in the UPA government, used to say that there were two mass leaders in North India – Indira Gandhi and Charan Singh. And the late farmer leader is still a household name in western UP.
For the BJP, the UP fight is not so much winning the maximum seats in the state, which it is confident of doing, but of raising its tally from 64 currently to beyond the 71 figure it reached in 2014.
The Mandir in the Modi mantra is exemplified by the Bharat Ratna to Advani. Given the sidelining and bitterness of the veteran leader under the Modi government, the honour was a surprise. A founder of the BJP along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani was also the man who led the Rath Yatra turning the Ayodhya Ram temple demand into a political movement.
With the Bharat Ratna to Advani, Modi sent a suitable signal of magnanimity to the party’s workers, while also underlining his confidence in his own absolute unassailability.
Come now to the ‘Market’, and that explains the nod to Narasimha Rao, the father of the economic reforms in India, who took tough decisions to open up the economy soon after taking over as PM in 1991. But Rao’s importance also lies in him being from South India, a “Telugu bidda” from Andhra Pradesh, with the Modi government going out of its way to reach out to the region. (Swaminathan incidentally is a fellow South Indian, from Tamil Nadu.)
The BJP has seen many virtues in Rao since his death, underlining how the Gandhi family had shunned him, ostensibly for “letting” the Babri Masjid demolition happen under him in 1992. His body was not even allowed to be kept at the AICC headquarters in Delhi for Congress colleagues to pay their last respects to him. The BJP has made another stride towards owning Rao now, and acknowledging his achievement in stabilising the country when it was aflame with Mandal and Mandir conflicts, and facing strife in Jammu and Kashmir.
These five men who have been honoured in the last couple of weeks were not flawless leaders, nor did the country become free of problems under their stewardship. Some of them even took decisions which deepened the existing fault lines. But they have all arguably been ratnas of Bharat.
