Not just Subhas Bose: Cong, BJP both turning Bharat Ratna into poll ploy

We should just give a Bharat Ratna to the Emperor Ashoka while we are about it. Yes, the lion capital is the National Emblem already and the Ashoka Chakra is on the national flag. But it’s apparently never too late for a Bharat Ratna. A posthumous Bharat Ratna should only be given very, very selectively. Ideally it should only be awarded to someone who died very recently as a way to honour him/her. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the first posthumous recipient fit that bill. Acharya Vinoba Bhave should have got it in his lifetime but he was honoured right after he died in 1982. [caption id=“attachment_1232681” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Subhas Chandra Bose. AFP[/caption] Or it could be given to correct a historic wrong. It’s unlikely a Gandhi-led government would have ever given Jayaprakash Narayan a Bharat Ratna. Either way a truly deserving Bharat Ratna candidate should fulfil Marcus Cato’s famous saying about statues – “I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.” In that sense, a Bharat Ratna for the ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee makes perfect sense. He is a former prime minister with a long record in public service and the UPA government did not do the honours leaving the NDA to honour its own. The Bharat Ratna has disproportionately honoured prime ministers and presidents and why should Vajpayee be excluded from being accorded that respect? But the list of names of dead heroes being apparently mulled for the Bharat Ratna by politicians of all stripes sounds like someone playing tic-tac-toe with the index of a history text book. Bhagat Singh. Subhas Bose. Lala Lajpat Rai. Sukhdev. Gopal Krishna Gokhale. The Bharat Ratna has already been criticized for waking up to the value of its jewels beyond compare after the rest of the world has honoured them. Mother Teresa got her Bharat Ratna after her Nobel. Amartya Sen got his award after his Nobel. Satyajit Ray’s Bharat Ratna was announced after his Oscar. But this list takes it to another level of ridiculousness. To honour someone with a Bharat Ratna after they have already been immortalized in our text books and even worse, turned into a film starring Ajay Devgn, is beyond pointless. Bhagat Singh, at this point in our history, is well beyond lifetime achievement awards for “exceptional service/performance of the highest order” in “any field of human endeavour.” What makes it worse and even humiliating is a Bharat Ratna now for some of these historic figures actually reduces their stature in the guise of honouring them. “How can Netaji be given a Bharat Ratna after 43 people?” wonders his grandnephew and current MP, Sugata Bose in The Telegraph. The Boses have other reasons for not wanting a Bharat Ratna for their legendary forebear. In 1992 there was an attempt to give Bose a Bharat Ratna but his family claimed it could not give Netaji an award “posthumously” given that the Government of India had not officially accepted his 1945 airplane crash death. It’s not that hope springs eternal. Bose would be almost 120 years old now even if survived that airplane crash and even the most diehard Bose-acolyte cannot be holding out for that particular hero. But there has been a long sense of the neglect of Bose by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. “We have not paid him due respect. It is time this is corrected,” Infosys founder Narayana Murthy said at the annual Netaji lecture in 2011. Bose’s family claims that the “best way to honour him is to declassify government files which can reveal the truth behind his disappearance.” And yes, perhaps naming a major avenue in Delhi after Subhas Bose would be a good place to begin the process of honouring Netaji instead of this Bharat Ratna afterthought. Given the Congress’ iron-clad grip over the freedom fighter portion of our history, the BJP has long been in search of heroes it can call indisputably its own. It claims Sardar Patel via statue and thinks it can claim some others now by adoption via a Bharat Ratna. But it makes the government sound a bit like the Gollum paraphrased if it stakes its claim to history too greedily – “We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little Congresses. Wicked, tricksy, false!” But the Congress demands of Bharat Ratnas for Rajguru, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale are equally ludicrous as if the party, now that it’s out of power, has suddenly woken up to all the non-Gandhi/Nehru leaders in India’s archives and wants to hurriedly copyright them. After 10 years of UPA rule and decades of Congress domination, it’s entirely understandable that the new BJP government will want to put forward an alternative pantheon of heroes. There were amusing media reports about bureaucrats scrambling to brush up on their Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyaya trivia after the Modi sarkar came to power. When Mamata Banerjee ended over three decades of Communist rule, the babus in Writers Building had to scramble to find pictures of long-neglected and half-forgotten Bengali cultural figures. Didi liked to celebrate their birthdays with little impromptu song-and-incense ceremonies in front of her office. She celebrated some 50 birthdays in her first seven months in office. “It’s all a function of her whims now,” a nervous officer in the department told India Today . “We do not know whose turn it is next. We might just not have a photograph or portrait of that person.” The Congress proposal of a Kanshi Ram for a Bharat Ratna, if true, is clearly a UP election ploy - an attempt to queer the BJP’s pitch as it tries to coax the Dalit vote out of Mayawati’s handbag. But even that is understandable. Rajiv Gandhi’s government honoured M G Ramachandran posthumously hoping some of the shine of the award would rub off on his party before the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. V P Singh was accused of doing the same with Ambedkar to woo Dalits. It’s tragic when a national icon becomes a pre-poll sop but it’s not unprecedented. The Congress’ Rashid Alvi’s advice that the awards should be announced only after the upcoming Assembly elections in four states, including Maharashtra and Haryana, to avoid any politics, is a little too much propriety too late. But the government should think long and hard before it opens the Bharat Ratna Pandora’s box by delving too far back into our history. The list of dead people who could be regarded as having given “exceptional service” is a long and illustrious one. And giving awards to long dead figures just resurrects the ghosts of many other claimants. Why not Rabindranath Tagore? Or Prem Chand? Swami Vivekananda? Or Mangal Pandey? At some point the government has to wonder if the figure it is choosing to honour has already become bigger than the honour itself. Honestly, we should just let some sleeping heroes lie.