Editorial: Not an award by consensus

To say that bestowing the Bharat Ratna on LK Advani is politically motivated is to state the obvious. All that the Narendra Modi regime has done in its second term in office has been politically motivated. In fact, from the disregard it has for all metrics of socioeconomic performance, except those it can boast about, it is fairly evident that the governance part of being in government does not appeal much to this regime; but rearranging the constitutional furniture immensely excites it. All its acts in office have been meant to signal a change in the ruling ideology of India. Now, giving Advani the highest award of the land is just another signal of the normalisation of Hindutva. If such signals have been coming in a flurry lately, it is because the centenary of the founding of the RSS falls due next year, 2025, and much remains to be done.

Since the Bharat Ratna is a lifetime achievement award and Advani’s record in public service or government was always second to more luminous peers, it can only be inferred that he is being honoured for his political work, that is, for building up the BJP from a splinter of the Janata Party into the battering ram it became in the 1990s. This he did by stoking religious passions over the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue, which culminated in the demolition of the mosque in 1992. This one event, more than anything he did as party president or as deputy to Atal Bihari Vajpayee a decade later, is what Advani will be associated with in the memory of this nation.

The destruction of the mosque by thousands of karsevaks took place as he stood helplessly by, pleading with his aides to din some RSS manners into the vandals. In the aftermath of the demolition, which led to communal riots all over the country, he described the demolition as ‘shameful’. A decade later, he remembered it as a ‘terrible day’. So, the irony of this honour is that the recipient’s pride is likely to have at least a shade of embarrassment.

To carp that giving the Bharat Ratna to Advani, primarily a politician, negates the spirit of the award, is to cry over spilt milk. Until it was thrown open to “all areas of endeavour” in 2011, the award was limited to exceptional service in the arts, literature, science and public service. Yet, the majority of honorees have been politicians, limiting artists, writers and scientists to a minority. At least 30 of the 50 winners so far have been personalities who held political office. There have been a few cases of state-level politicians being named to the award to please voters before an election. So, it’s not exceptional that six out of seven Bharat Ratna awardees in the Narendra Modi era have been politicians or political ideologues.

In the popular imagination, the Bharat Ratna winner is thought to embody the values of the nation. But who is to define what those are, and which personality could possibly be imbued with all of them? Of the 50 Bharat Ratna awardees so far, there would be national consensus on only a handful, and most of them belong to the category of artists, writers and scientists. Not everybody can be a Lata Mangeshkar.