DMK’s Bharat Ratna demand for Anna revives memories of Dravidian self-determination

The demand by DMK chief M Karunanidhi for a Bharat Ratna for former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and a doyen of the Dravidian movement CN Annadurai is certainly justified, but what it also brings out is a historical paradox - the prospect of a man who once fiercely demanded the right for self determination getting the highest civilian honour from the nation.

Suggesting his name for the posthumous honour, Karunanidhi wrote to President Pranab Kumar Mukherjee: “We understand that the Union government is considering conferment of the Bharat Ratna on some of our national leaders. Anna may be given the award on the Republic Day… He is a great social reformer, great writer, orator and litterateur. His literary and political works, both in Tamil and English, have been acclaimed as one of the best in the State.”

Contrast this with Anna’s maiden speech in Rajya Sabha in 1962, when he spoke of a separate Dravidian state:

“I claim, Sir, to come from a country, a part of India now, but which I think is of a different stock, not necessarily antagonistic. I belong to the Dravidian stock. I am proud to call myself a Dravidian, That does not mean that I am against a Bengali or a Maharashtrian or a Gujarati… I consider that the Dravidians have got something concrete, something distinct, something different to offer to the nation at large. Therefore it is that we want self determination.”

Anna’s idea then was secession and a separate country, “a small nation, compact, homogenous and united, wherein sections of people in the whole area can have a community of sentiment.”

However, as the DMK would argue, it’s a fact that in the wake of the Chinese incursion, Anna dropped the idea and came to the support of the Indian nation. He had famously said: “We need to get our Dravida Nadu from Pandit Nehru, not from the Chinese”. In a meeting at Vellore, he said: Only if there is a country, can we run the party. When the country is in danger, for us to advocate separation would be to give way to the foreigner. If we do so our future generations will curse us”.

From a secessionist, as his political opponents would then describe him, he sounded like a strong nationalist.

The sentiments of the Dravidian nation subsequently withered away and slowly the DMK became a stronger stakeholder of power in Delhi. Except for lone voices here and there, the Dravidian politics too became part of the national mainstream. Nobody talks of Anna’s unfulfilled dream of a Dravidian nation anymore and the life thereof. Therefore, Karunanidhi might not betray any qualms in asking for the highest civilian order for the departed leader.

Anna was a stupendous leader, a great Dravidian ideologue, whose fame was legendary not just in Tamil Nadu, but in the rest of south India as well. In Tamil Nadu, his popularity was unparalleled. In “Anna, the life and times of CN Annadurai”, biographer R Kannan noted: “The Tamils judge a person by the attendance at one’s funeral and beyond the niceties said on the occasion. Anna was judged well, for Tamil families around the world mourned his passing away as a personal bereavement. If he conjured up mammoth crowds while he lived, next only to Nehru, in his death he created a record that remains unbeaten.”

“Unlike Nehru, however, Anna’s beginnings were far from aristocratic. They were rather modest and Anna often prided himself on being a ‘commoner’. Yet, from those humble beginnings, he rose to be loved by his people like none other before or after him.”

As Kannan notes in his book, Karunanidhi had written on Anna’s death: “they say he is a leader, a philosopher, an actor, a playwright, an orator, a writer, a human being, a gem, a minister, a mother, a protector of the language, a politician; but for those who cannot call call him so by each of these descriptions, his mother had chosen the name Anna so that they could call him so with love.”

Although the demand is never too late, what’s surprising is that why the DMK had never raised it earlier, although it had been part of the NDA and the UPA governments. According to the Deccan Chronicle, party spokesman TKS Elangovan said, “we are asking now because we see this government is seriously considering conferring Bharat Ratna on some of the well-known leaders like Subash Chandra Bose, who died 50-60 years ago”.