Populism over honour

The Bharat Ratna is of the politician, by the politician, for the politician.
A look at the Bharat Ratnas awarded since inception makes revealing reading. In their 60 years of existence — the Padma awards were instituted in 1954 — the Bharat Ratna has been given out 43 times. And of these 43 times, as many as 23 have gone to those in politics, that’s more than 50 per cent of the time.

You would expect this imbalance in the first few years after Independence — after all, the people of greatest importance in national life then were those who were involved in the freedom struggle and then moved into politics. So, it’s no surprise that there is a plethora of what the awards call “independence activists”: C. Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, S. Radhakrishnan, Govind Ballabh Pant, B.C. Roy, President Zakir Husain and the more obscure Bhagwan Das and Purushottam Das Tandon.

This emphasis on politicians also has something to do with the procedure for the Bharat Ratna, which unlike other Padma awards does not go through a many tiered process but is the sole prerogative of the Prime Minister. But the wonder is that even an enlightened Prime Minister like Jawaharlal Nehru in his many years at the head of government only found one scientist (C.V. Raman), one technologist (M. Visvesvaraya), one social reformer (Maharshi Karve) and one scholar (Pandurang Kane) worthy of the award.

Even Indira Gandhi, who was so very encouraging of culture and the arts, found no one in those fields good enough for the Bharat Ratna. In fact, the very first person from these fields to be recognised was Satyajit Ray in 1992! Even Ray was given the Bharat Ratna as a seeming afterthought: he only got his Bharat Ratna after he received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. There are other such notable afterthoughts: Amartya Sen, Nobel in 1998, Bharat Ratna in 1999; Mother Teresa, Nobel in 1980, Bharat Ratna some months later.

There are other anomalies too. Only four scientists have ever got the Bharat Ratna; and oddly enough, Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai are not part of that quartet! And amazingly, J.R.D. Tata is the only industrialist in the entire Bharat Ratna list. Also in the list of 43, there are just five women. Yet, another oddity; Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, two of our most distinguished Prime Ministers, gave the Bharat Ratna to themselves when they were PMs! The only politician to have refused to thus pat himself in the back is our first education minister, Abul Kalam Azad. (He was given the award posthumously in 1992).

Posthumous awards are a real can of worms. This particular can has been opened as many as 11 times, i.e. 25 per cent of the total Bharat Ratna awards. As it happens, most of these have been given for political purposes. You can understand the posthumous awards given to Lal Bahadur Shastri and Rajiv Gandhi soon after their tragic and unexpected deaths, but what does one say about giving recognition so late in the day to B.R. Ambedkar (1990), Vallabhbhai Patel (1991), Jayaprakash Narayan (1999) and Vinoba Bhave (1983)?

Surely to confer the award as an afterthought to such distinguished people was more of an insult to them? It all becomes understandable when you realise that their timing was dictated by political exigencies. But even an afterthought is better than using India’s highest award for political gains as it was when conferred posthumously on K. Kamaraj, M.G. Ramachandran and Gopinath Bordoloi, the awards being announced just before Assembly elections in their states.

The other point about posthumous awards is how posthumous can they be? Hockey wizard Dhyan Chand is surely the most deserving of candidates but should it be given to him so many years after his death? Where do you stop? Why not Rabindranath Tagore? Lokmanya Tilak? Bhagat Singh?

It’s not clear who floated the name of Subhas Chandra Bose this year, because it has come up before and even then his family had rejected the idea. In January 1992, the President’s secretariat issued a press release saying that it had been decided to confer the Bharat Ratna on Bose posthumously. A PIL in the Calcutta high court asked this to be revoked on the grounds that the legendary freedom fighter had not been officially pronounced dead so he couldn’t be given a posthumous award! Absurdly, a special division bench was actually set up by the Supreme Court to hear this petition which was dismissed on the grounds that the Bharat Ratna had not been conferred, only announced, so it couldn’t be revoked.

In the same year, the Supreme Court set up another special division bench, this time with as many as five judges to hear two petitions challenging the very institution of all Padma awards on the ground that they were titles and all titles had been abolished in Independent India. To hear the PIL, the Madhya Pradesh high court actually suspended all awards till a decision was taken. This was done by the division bench which decreed that these were awards, not titles so there could be no bar on them. There are two byproducts of this: you can’t call yourself Padma Shri such and such and no Bharat Ratna was given between 1992 and 1997.

The speculation around the Bharat Ratna this year has sunk to a new low, sparked off by speculation that the government was going to give as many as five awards. The names swirling around included Atal Behari Vajpayee, not unexpected since he was BJP’s first Prime Minister. But why Subhas Chandra Bose now? Because of impending elections in West Bengal? Why Kanshi Ram? Because of elections in Uttar Pradesh? Why Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of Banaras Hindu University so late in the day? As a counterpoint someone (in the Congress of course), suggested Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University! You can see where all this is going. Should it be allowed to go there? Should our national awards degenerate into an ideological and political plaything?

What this government can do to stop this seemingly irretrievable slide downwards of our awards is to announce a firm future course of action. The first should be to abolish posthumous awards altogether, a policy the Nobel Committee has stuck to religiously. The second is to depoliticise the award by forming a selection committee of eminent people to advise the Prime Minister on who should get the award. The PM can retain some control by having the power to pick names from the selection committee’s list, but he shouldn’t be able to override it. These two measures will ensure that future Bharat Ratnas and Padma awardees are truly deserving of the honour.

The writer is a senior journalist