Print: 28 Oct 2025
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party goes into fresh parliamentary elections in a few months, his government has chosen an unprecedented number of five eminent persons, four of them from the world of politics, for India’s highest civilian award Bharat Ratna.
Never before India has seen five persons selected in a single year for the honour. The conventional practice had been to name or, at the most, two persons in a year. The Modi dispensation’s five choices, four of them posthumously, this year came in the space of eighteen days.
On 23 January, socialist leader from Bihar Karpoori Thakur, a champion of backward caste welfare, was named for the top award followed by BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani a few days later. On 9 February came the names of three more persons for the award—former PMs P V Narasimha Rao, who was the head of a minority Congress government from 1991-96, and Chaudhary Charan Singh of Uttar Pradesh state, who occupied the post for less than six months from January to July 1979 heading a shaky coalition dispensation and leading agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan, considered the father of India’s green revolution in 1960s.
Apart from recognising the individual contributions, the selection of all five personalities so close to national elections carries significant political messaging for at least three key constituents of the electorate in sync with BJP’s hardline Hindutva plank (Advani), Hindu backward caste groups (Karpoori Thakur), farmers and other backward castes (Charan Singh) and the farmers-scientific community-middle class (Swaminathan).
Advani had led BJP’s Ram temple movement and contributed to the resurgence of the party from just a couple of seats in Lok Sabha in 1984 to 89 in 1989 and 120 in 1991, and had for long been the poster boy of BJP’s hardline Hindutva till his controversial visit to the memorial of Mohd Ali Jinnah in Pakistan in 2005 and description of Pakistan’s founder as a “secular”. Advani’s action went against the basic ideology of RSS, BJP’s ideological fountainhead but was perhaps a calculated attempt to live down his image as a hawk. Many political analysts consider the start of Advani’s decline in BJP, which culminated in the emergence of Modi as the party’s prime ministerial face in the run-up to the 2014 national elections. Advani’s dream of becoming the PM after playing second fiddle to Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1996 and 1998 was shattered.
Advani-Modi relationship has been marked by back and forth. BJP sources say it was Advani who promoted Modi as a young RSS worker and elevated him in the BJP ranks, helping him become Gujarat chief minister in the early 2000s. While Vajpayee had, by his famous “raj dharma” remark, appeared to indicate his disapproval of Modi as chief minister after the 2002 Gujarat riots, which left 2,000 people dead, it was Advani who had reportedly backed Modi at that time. Thereafter, Modi-led BJP ensured Advani’s seven successive victories in Lok Sabha elections from Gujarat.
Ironically, when indications emerged that Modi would be BJP’s PM face in the 2014 parliamentary poll after a decade of Congress rule, Advani sulked, which did not go down well with the then Gujarat chief minister. The marginalisation of Advani in BJP became more pronounced after Modi became the PM when the former was named a member of the party’s “Margdarshak Mandal”, a euphemism for political sunset. Despite being the sole face of the Ram temple movement in 1990, Advani, now 96 years of age, was not invited to the high-profile consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on 22 January, presided by Modi, sparking a buzz in political circles.
The choice of Karpoori Thakur is also in keeping with the past trend of BJP’s previous incarnation Jan Sangh aligning with socialists, Swatantra Party and Communists formed the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments in many states, keeping Congress out of power there. It is a different matter that these coalition experiments were short-lived. Secondly, the BJP sought to woo the people of Bihar by picking Karpoori Thakur because the state has the fourth-largest number of Lok Sabha seats.
The decision to award Bharat Ratna to Narasimha Rao, India’s first PM of a Congress government from outside the Gandhi clan, is part of BJP’s efforts to politically rile the grand old party, which has, by and large, ignored his contributions as the architect of India’s economic reforms and liberalisation in the 1990s.
In sharp contrast to the majority centre-of-the-left leanings of all previous Congress dispensations in India, Rao represented the party’s minority centre-of-the-right moorings. Similar thinking was behind the Modi government’s awarding Pranab Mukherjee of Congress with Bharat Ratna for he was perceived to be a man, whom his party never allowed to be India’s first Bengali PM.
Besides, Rao’s ties with Sonia Gandhi were frayed when the former was prime minister. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 took place when Rao was the PM and Congress was a divided house when it came to assessing his potential role in preventing it. Congress has for years shied away from acknowledging Rao’s role in liberalising the Indian economy when Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister.
It was only in recent years that Congress appeared to have rethought Rao. In 2020 Sonia Gandhi commended Rao’s leadership and pointed to his accomplishments. Responding to Bharat Ratna for Rao, Sonia said, “I welcome it. Why not?”
It is also not hard to miss the political message behind Charan Singh’s choice for Bharat Ratna. Although primarily a regional satrap, he comes from a state that has the highest number of Lok Sabha seats (80). Hailing from the farming community could help the BJP pacify the farmers of the state and outside, who have been protesting the Modi government’s farm policies for the last five years. Secondly, this could also help prod Charan Singh’s grandson Jayant Chowdhury, President of a regional party Rashtriya Lok Dal, to leave the alliance with Samajwadi Party, a key member of the opposition INDIA alliance in UP. And the strategy seems to be working. Jayant has not only welcomed Bharat Ratna for his grandfather but commended the Modi government for conferring an honour that no previous government has done.
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The writer is a veteran Indian journalist
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Political Messaging of This Year’s Bharat Ratna
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party goes into fresh parliamentary elections in a few months, his government has chosen an unprecedented number of five eminent persons, four of them from the world of politics, for India’s highest civilian award Bharat Ratna.
Never before India has seen five persons selected in a single year for the honour. The conventional practice had been to name or, at the most, two persons in a year. The Modi dispensation’s five choices, four of them posthumously, this year came in the space of eighteen days.
On 23 January, socialist leader from Bihar Karpoori Thakur, a champion of backward caste welfare, was named for the top award followed by BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani a few days later. On 9 February came the names of three more persons for the award—former PMs P V Narasimha Rao, who was the head of a minority Congress government from 1991-96, and Chaudhary Charan Singh of Uttar Pradesh state, who occupied the post for less than six months from January to July 1979 heading a shaky coalition dispensation and leading agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan, considered the father of India’s green revolution in 1960s.
Apart from recognising the individual contributions, the selection of all five personalities so close to national elections carries significant political messaging for at least three key constituents of the electorate in sync with BJP’s hardline Hindutva plank (Advani), Hindu backward caste groups (Karpoori Thakur), farmers and other backward castes (Charan Singh) and the farmers-scientific community-middle class (Swaminathan).
Advani had led BJP’s Ram temple movement and contributed to the resurgence of the party from just a couple of seats in Lok Sabha in 1984 to 89 in 1989 and 120 in 1991, and had for long been the poster boy of BJP’s hardline Hindutva till his controversial visit to the memorial of Mohd Ali Jinnah in Pakistan in 2005 and description of Pakistan’s founder as a “secular”. Advani’s action went against the basic ideology of RSS, BJP’s ideological fountainhead but was perhaps a calculated attempt to live down his image as a hawk. Many political analysts consider the start of Advani’s decline in BJP, which culminated in the emergence of Modi as the party’s prime ministerial face in the run-up to the 2014 national elections. Advani’s dream of becoming the PM after playing second fiddle to Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1996 and 1998 was shattered.
Advani-Modi relationship has been marked by back and forth. BJP sources say it was Advani who promoted Modi as a young RSS worker and elevated him in the BJP ranks, helping him become Gujarat chief minister in the early 2000s. While Vajpayee had, by his famous “raj dharma” remark, appeared to indicate his disapproval of Modi as chief minister after the 2002 Gujarat riots, which left 2,000 people dead, it was Advani who had reportedly backed Modi at that time. Thereafter, Modi-led BJP ensured Advani’s seven successive victories in Lok Sabha elections from Gujarat.
Ironically, when indications emerged that Modi would be BJP’s PM face in the 2014 parliamentary poll after a decade of Congress rule, Advani sulked, which did not go down well with the then Gujarat chief minister. The marginalisation of Advani in BJP became more pronounced after Modi became the PM when the former was named a member of the party’s “Margdarshak Mandal”, a euphemism for political sunset. Despite being the sole face of the Ram temple movement in 1990, Advani, now 96 years of age, was not invited to the high-profile consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on 22 January, presided by Modi, sparking a buzz in political circles.
The choice of Karpoori Thakur is also in keeping with the past trend of BJP’s previous incarnation Jan Sangh aligning with socialists, Swatantra Party and Communists formed the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments in many states, keeping Congress out of power there. It is a different matter that these coalition experiments were short-lived. Secondly, the BJP sought to woo the people of Bihar by picking Karpoori Thakur because the state has the fourth-largest number of Lok Sabha seats.
The decision to award Bharat Ratna to Narasimha Rao, India’s first PM of a Congress government from outside the Gandhi clan, is part of BJP’s efforts to politically rile the grand old party, which has, by and large, ignored his contributions as the architect of India’s economic reforms and liberalisation in the 1990s.
In sharp contrast to the majority centre-of-the-left leanings of all previous Congress dispensations in India, Rao represented the party’s minority centre-of-the-right moorings. Similar thinking was behind the Modi government’s awarding Pranab Mukherjee of Congress with Bharat Ratna for he was perceived to be a man, whom his party never allowed to be India’s first Bengali PM.
Besides, Rao’s ties with Sonia Gandhi were frayed when the former was prime minister. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 took place when Rao was the PM and Congress was a divided house when it came to assessing his potential role in preventing it. Congress has for years shied away from acknowledging Rao’s role in liberalising the Indian economy when Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister.
It was only in recent years that Congress appeared to have rethought Rao. In 2020 Sonia Gandhi commended Rao’s leadership and pointed to his accomplishments. Responding to Bharat Ratna for Rao, Sonia said, “I welcome it. Why not?”
It is also not hard to miss the political message behind Charan Singh’s choice for Bharat Ratna. Although primarily a regional satrap, he comes from a state that has the highest number of Lok Sabha seats (80). Hailing from the farming community could help the BJP pacify the farmers of the state and outside, who have been protesting the Modi government’s farm policies for the last five years. Secondly, this could also help prod Charan Singh’s grandson Jayant Chowdhury, President of a regional party Rashtriya Lok Dal, to leave the alliance with Samajwadi Party, a key member of the opposition INDIA alliance in UP. And the strategy seems to be working. Jayant has not only welcomed Bharat Ratna for his grandfather but commended the Modi government for conferring an honour that no previous government has done.
_______________________________________
The writer is a veteran Indian journalist