Unhappy is the land that has no heroes

Through these columns a year ago, I had shown how the award of the Bharat Ratna had been steadily politicised over the years. In the fiftie...

Through these columns a year ago, I had shown how the award of the Bharat Ratna had been steadily politicised over the years. In the fifties and sixties a happy balance was struck between governance and scholarship: nominations to statesmen such as Nehru and G.B. Pant being matched by awards to scholars like S. Radhakrishnan and P.V. Kane. In later decades, however, and especially under the Gandhis, mother and son, the Bharat Ratna was cynically used to reward political loyalty or subservience. Hence the names of V.V. Giri and M.G. Ramachandran came to nest alongside jewels like Nehru and Radhakrishnan. V.P. Singh took the process further. The politics he knew was the politics of vote banks. He thus chose, as his nominees for the award, representative Dalit, Muslim, Bengali and Gujarati politicians — all long dead.

Last month’s award of the Bharat Ratna to Dr A.P.J. Kalam has been met with generous acclaim. I gave myself a pat on the back for predicting it in my article, but the media comment on the award has since made me take that pat back. For it is depressingly clear that the systematic manipulation of the Bharat Ratna has led to a widespread amnesia among our thinking classes about what the award means and who some of its great recipients were. In a profile of Kalam, The Indian Express made the mistaken claim that Homi Bhabha was the only previous scientist to be so honoured. The error was repeated in an editorial in The Times of India — this went on to make the conspiratorially idiotic suggestion that the doves in the government made Kalam a Bharat Ratna to buy his silence, so that he would not proceed with the development of newer and more deadly missiles.

In fact, Homi Bhabha was never made a Bharat Ratna. The Times and The Express probably reproduced the claim from a Press Trust of India release that made the mistake in the first place. But why did the newspapers not check? Sheer laziness, or perhaps the assumption that if a scientist were to made a Bharat Ratna he had to be close to state power, as Kalam is and Bhabha once was. What else can explain the obliteration from their record of C.V. Raman, who was made a Bharat Ratna in the first batch, 1954, and a scientist of such towering magnitude of achievement that all other Indians are also-rans by comparison? Also forgotten, incidentally, was the engineer M. Visvesvarayya, not a `pure’ scientist but an applied one (like Kalam himself).

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The Hindu, a newspaper which prides itself on being slow but truthful, seems to have cross-checked, and did not make this mistake. But it made other ones. It complimented Kalam on being the `second Tamil’ to be made a Bharat Ratna, the first being C.V. Raman. Raman was, admittedly, of Tamil blood, but he made his home and did much of his scientific work in Bangalore. If the Tamils want to claim Raman they could also claim Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a Tamil-speaking Andhra who lived in Madras. But why did The Hindu forget the name of the long-serving Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu?

Because they privately agreed that MGR didn’t deserve the Bharat Ratna, or since he was, by blood, not a Tamil but a Malayali? And how could The Hindu forget a Bharat Ratna who was a Tamil by blood and Chief Minister of Madras as well as a writer and scholar of considerable distinction? How did this Iyengar-owned paper forget the name of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari?

Andrea, a character in Brecht’s Galileo, remarks that “unhappy is the land that has no heroes.” To this Galileo responds: “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes’. I must admit that I am with the unsung Andrea here. All nations need heroes, the question is the criteria by which they reward or remember them. The Bharat Ratna is our preeminent national honour, to be bestowed with care and discernment. But it has been so polluted by politicians that we have forgotten a time when the award matched the awardee, when by making C.V. Raman or Jawaharlal Nehru Bharat Ratna, India was doing little more than honouring itself. One hopes that the selection of Kalam signals a renewal in this respect, when the award will once again recognise exceptional achievement in the arts, the sciences, and public service, regardless of party considerations.

The writer is a historian and sociologist