Proposals for Awards & Portraits : Some Questions By Anil Nauriya There have been uncontradicted reports in a section

of the press that V.D. Savarkar and Shyamaprasad Mookerjee are being considered for the award of Bharat Ratna. The proposal is misconceived. It is perhaps not very widely known that Savarkar had sent two mercy petitions to the colonial government from the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. The petition dated November 14, 1913, which refers also to Savarkar's earlier petition of 1911, is reprinted in R.C. Majumdar's `Penal Settlement in Andamans'. The petition assures the British regime: "Now no man having the good of India and humanity at heart will blindly step on the thorny paths which in the excited and hopeless situation of India in 1906-1907 beguiled us from the path of peace and progress. Therefore if the Government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government which is the foremost condition of that progress.'' And Savarkar never broke this promise to the Imperial government. It is this that explains much of his subsequent politics. At the time of the Quit India movement of 1942, Savarkar, as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, "called on the Hindus to give no support to the movement'' (see Amba Prasad, The Indian Revolt of 1942). No "jewel'' of the Indian nation, the later Savarkar fully subscribed to the two-nation theory. In his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha in December 1939, Savarkar declared: "We Hindus are a nation by ourselves ... we Hindus are marked out as an abiding Nation by ourselves'' (see Indian Annual Register, 1939, Vol II). In and after August 1942, thousands of Indians -- Muslims, Hindus and others -- were in detention. Several Indians, including Muslims and Dalits, had even faced British bullets. After all this had gone on for about a year, Savarkar issued another statement. He said: "For the last 30 years we have been accustomed to the ideology of geographical unity of India and the Congress has been the strongest advocate of that unity but suddenly the Muslim minority, which has been asking one concession after another, has after the Communal Award, come forward with the claim that it is a separate nation. I have no quarrel with Mr Jinnah's two-nation theory. We, Hindus, are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations'' (Indian Annual Register, 1943, Vol II). This politics of hate, division and communal polarisation was acquiesced in and even substantially continued by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. An insight into this is available from an incident recorded by Pyarelal in his account of January 30, 1948, the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. Pyarelal had been sent by Gandhi to Mookerjee with a message and reported back to Gandhi on January 30. This is how Pyarelal describes the incident: "On the previous day he had sent me to Dr Rajendra Prasad to inquire about his health, and with a message to Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, who was at that time a minister of the Central Cabinet, to bring to his attention the activities of a Hindu Mahasabha worker who had been delivering highly inflammatory speeches containing incitement to assassination of some Congress leaders. Could not Dr Mookerjee, as the Hindu Mahasabha leader, use his authority to put a curb on such wild

utterances? Dr Mookerjee's reply was halting and unsatisfactory...Gandhiji's brow darkened as I repeated tohim Dr Mookerjee's reply'' (Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase Part II).

Neither of the two names reportedly put forward for award of Bharat Ratna can withstand scrutiny. They will not add to the prestige of the award. That apart, conferring the award on them will foster an erroneous understanding of nationhood. A practice has grown of the government in power politicising such awards as also the installation of portraits in the Central Hall of Parliament. There must be a broad national consensus on such awards, or the awards themselves ought to be abolished. Indian Express, January 17, 2001