Posthumous conferrings of the Bharat Ratna have, with one or two exceptions, occasioned the thought in me: ‘why could the honouring not have been done in his lifetime?’ The ones announced last Friday of those on the late M.S. Swaminathan and the two former prime ministers, Chaudhary Charan Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao, have not been exceptions. But that response apart, they reminded me of the very first Bharat Ratna that was conferred posthumously.
President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was woken up at 2 am on January 11, 1966 to be told that Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri had died of a heart attack in Tashkent two hours earlier. For one who is 78 himself and in none too great health, to be startled by such an interruption at that hour is no simple thing. But Radhakrishnan was no ordinary man. Apart from the fact that he had in Yezdi Gundevia of the ICS an ace secretary and in Sarvepalli Gopal a historian son who gave him immense, if also inconspicuous, strength, the philosopher head of State had a mind that had been honed by years of discipline to be poised, unruffled and — awake. Radhakrishnan moved swiftly to summon the seniormost cabinet minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, and swore him in as acting prime minister with the clear understanding that the Congress Legislature Party, which commanded a majority in the Lok Sabha, would have to elect its new leader very soon. His priority as president was to ensure that India would not be without a prime minister.
It was after his duties by the Constitution had been done that the president sat down to grieve for the man he had sworn in as prime minister only eighteen months earlier upon the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. Lal Bahadur, as he called his prime minister seventeen years younger than himself, had done the nation proud by helming a decisive victory over the aggressive forces of neighbouring Pakistan only a few weeks earlier. As one in whom the supreme command of the Indian armed forces was vested, President Radhakrishnan knew what that victory meant.
Asking, in those wee hours of that January day, for a radio broadcast to the nation to be arranged at 8 am, he prepared the address within his uniquely puissant mind. Said President Radhakrishnan to his fellow-citizens in his speech: “I had once or twice, spoken to Lal Bahadur about the greatest distinction we have in our gift of Bharat Ratna and I had decided to announce this award on him on the Republic Day. I do so now with a sad heart and confer on him the Bharat Ratna posthumously.”
When the president had spoken to the prime minister “once or twice” about the Bharat Ratna, it was obviously in the context of it being conferred on him for the extraordinary victory achieved under his leadership in the war. We do not know what Shastri’s response to the presidential sounding was but we may assume that it would have been consistent with his temperament — extreme self-denying humility. Shastri knew how the nation had hailed the armed forces for their stellar performance in repelling the aggression and how his own standing among the people of India had zoomed. As Shastri himself said to a senior writer, from a time when watching the mandatory documentaries put up by cinema houses before the start of the main film they laughed at the diminutive successor to Nehru, they now clapped thunderously whenever he appeared on the screen. Shastri knew that. He would yet have, most likely, put off a direct positive response to President Radhakrishnan.
But now he was gone.
Radhakrishnan’s posthumous conferring — the first ever — on the former late prime minister was, however, not just on one who had won a difficult war but on one who had won a fraught peace. Radhakrishnan said in his address: “… the conflict with Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch and in Jammu and Kashmir shocked our people. A united national effort was put forth to withstand this attack and Lal Bahadur took the leading part in these matters. He went to Tashkent to conclude an agreement with Pakistan. The effort and the strain brought about his end. He died pledging our two countries to work for peace and friendship, forgetting the bitterness of past years.”
And there followed a rumination as only befits a philosopher-president. But Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, renowned professor of comparative religion and author of what is perhaps the most acclaimed commentary on the Bhagavad Gita that he was, was also the supreme commander of the armed forces of India. He was doubtless of that role of his when he said: “There can be no military solution to our problems. We should both realize that if we conquer our foes by force we enhance enmity and hatred. If we conquer them by understanding and attain goodwill we attain peace and goodwill. A peace based in repression and fear can only be temporary, while it will be lasting if it is based on moral force and truth.”
The challenges in waging peace faced today by Prime Minister Modi belong to a different order from those that Shastri faced in Tashkent.
India and Pakistan at that time had no nuclear weapons. Terrorism as we now know it had not raised its sinister head. Today, it would be hard for any president to say what Radhakrishnan said then. But there is such a thing as eternal verities and we should not forget that Prime Minister Modi, following the initiatives of the prime ministers, Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, went the extra mile to come to an understanding with the then prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif. All the violence that has marred our bilateral relations since that early move by him, and all the mutual trust-erosion that has occurred notwithstanding, I believe Prime Minister Modi cannot but want concord, not discord, with Pakistan.
Whatever be the other considerations that weighed with him in recommending to the president a posthumous Bharat Ratna for the former prime minister, Narasimha Rao, I would like to tell myself that the late prime minister’s several meetings with Nawaz Sharif at different venues to come to a concordat and his pathbreaking Border, Peace and Tranquility Agreement with China have something to do with it. I would like to believe that somewhere within its folds, the posthumous parchment to Narasimha Rao holds a recognition of the place of negotiation without bitterness in the conversations of our foreign policy.
Will the first posthumous Bharat Ratna to Lal Bahadur Shastri be seen in that perspective? It is very difficult to say it will, especially with the elections just concluded in Pakistan blurring the political scene there. But for precisely the reason that an unstable polity in Pakistan and an increasingly vengeance-minded society in India are bad news for peace, we must hope the instincts displayed by Prime Minister Modi in his first prime ministership will find another chance. I said a few sentences ago that no president of India today can speak like President Radhakrishnan spoke on January 11, 1966. I need to correct that. President Droupadi Murmu in her Republic Day-eve address to the nation last month quoted the Buddha, as Radhakrishnan might have, as saying: “Not at any time are enmities appeased here through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law.” I find something exquisitely apposite about a daughter of India’s tribal heritage in the part of India where Asoka saw the futility of war and enmity speak to us of the Buddha’s wisdom.
The natural question, ‘Why was the Bharat Ratna not given to P.V. Narasimha Rao in his lifetime?’, is less important than ‘Will the ‘greatest distinction in the gift of our Bharat Ratna’ that Radhakrishnan spoke of encourage a posthumous life for peace in our weaponised and terror-ridden subcontinent?’ M.S. Swaminathan was president of the Pugwash conferences from 2002 to 2007, working with other scientists for a world free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. His Bharat Ratna has to remind us of the very real threat of annihilation through error, terror or outright war that has its hood spread over the Indian subcontinent.
