Caveat on Bharat Ratna

Given the clamour for conferring the Bharat Ratna on Sachin Tendulkar from Bal Thackeray to Sourav Ganguly, it is now almost a certainty that the master batsman will get the award sooner or later. However, an observation of Farooq Abdullah in a television programme that the conferment of Bharat Ratna on Sachin will bring glory to the award itself inadvertently hinted at what has gone wrong with the honours system.

The expectation that Sachin will restore the original lustre of the coveted prize implies that he will receive the medal when it has lost its sheen. Such an interpretation is patently unfair to a person who is more deserving of the decoration than a number of other recipients. Yet, the devaluation of the award makes a derogatory value judgment of this nature unavoidable.

However, if and when Sachin receives the award, it is expected to mark the first step towards the restoration of its worth. But the question could arise whether he would have been considered for the honour if the prize had not been devalued. After all, however talented a batsman and nice a person he is, he is not Jawaharlal Nehru or Nelson Mandela or CV Raman.

The original purpose of the award was to give it to a great son or daughter of India, who has played a seminal role in moulding the country’s history. Or to a world citizen whose luminous personality has made him transgress the boundaries of his own country and stand out as a beacon for the rest of the world. Or to a scientist who brought glory to India by winning the Nobel Prize.

The fact that Sachin does not belong to this category will be obvious when one considers the case of Jawaharlal Nehru. Few were as qualified for the tribute as the first prime minister for his role as the architect of modern India and for laying down and strengthening the roots of democracy in this country when these were withering away in most of the newly-independent nations of Asia and Africa. That he was the fifth to get the Bharat Ratna suggests that the standards had become wobbly right from the start although it is also possible that Nehru himself had demurred since he was in power at the time.

This could not have been the case where his daughter Indira Gandhi was concerned, who was also in power when she received the award — or gave it to herself — in 1971. Along with her son Rajiv she must be counted among those whose contributions to the nation were overvalued. If Indira received the Bharat Ratna in 1971 for cutting Pakistan in half, she botched her own record by her tryst with dictatorship four years later. Similarly, Rajiv’s claim to fame remains his suspected involvement in the Bofors scandal, which makes him an unworthy recipient of the award in 1991, the year of his death.

There are, of course, others who were even less deserving. Heading the list in this respect was Gulzarilal Nanda, who was acting prime minister twice after the deaths of Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri before he was unceremoniously shunted out in favour of a more preferred choice. Why he should have been given the highest award is unclear unless it was to soothe his bruised ego.

Politics has evidently been the guiding factor in these selections, none more so than when the honour was conferred on VV Giri in 1975, presumably for having been Indira’s nominee for the president’s post in 1969 against the so-called syndicate’s Sanjeeva Reddy, and posthumously on Vinoba Bhave for having described the emergency as “anusashan parva” or the period of discipline.

Given this unedifying background, it was perhaps just as well that the Morarji Desai government discontinued the awards in 1977 because of their politicisation. Interestingly, when Indira restored them on returning to power in 1980, the first person who was chosen for it was Mother Teresa and (after Vinoba Bhave) Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, both of whom eminently deserved the honour. The Frontier Gandhi was the first person to be given the award despite not being a citizen of India, but his salutary past made that irrelevant. The other person was Nelson Mandela, the Gandhi of the present era.

Clearly, the quality of the recipients has varied wildly. There have also been curious controversies as when the award given posthumously to Subhash Chandra Bose was withdrawn because of the belief among Bengalis that he did not die in 1945. But the point remains that the Bharat Ratna hasn’t remained the untarnished jewel that it was supposed to be. Sachin, therefore, will receive a flawed medal.
The writer is a Delhi-based commentator