Unimportance of awards

I mean no disrespect to Republic Day awardees. Except for a few who have distinguished themselves in their respective fields, the rest have made the grade because they have connection, however remote, with the ruling party, this time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The earlier regime of the Congress Party was also guilty of promoting its own people for the honour.

This is, however, contrary to the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. They banned awards. That is the reason that when the Janata Party came in the wake of the popular movement, led by Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan, they stopped this practice. The person who initiated the awards was India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He wanted the recognition of people who had excelled in the fields of literature, economy and science. No money is given because the award was too valuable to be weighed on the scales of monetary benefit.

Nehru also did not want the award to be linked with politics. He did not envisage that one day the entire exercise of selection would get politicised. The government would pick up its chamchas (sycophants) to reward his or her services to the ruling party.

I recall that initially the Republic Day awards, started some 50 years ago, were under the Ministry of External Affairs which Nehru headed. Subsequently, the job was entrusted to the Home Ministry, which gave the responsibility to a deputy secretary. But he had too many things on his plate and passed on the task to the information officer attached to the ministry. That is how I came to handle the job, because I was then the Home Ministry's information officer.

The mode of selection was arbitrary. The prime minister and other ministers would suggest one or more names which I, as information officer, would stack in a file. Almost a month before the Republic Day, I had to shortlist the names. I must admit I followed no rules while preparing the list, which went to the deputy secretary in charge, then the home secretary and finally to the home minister. I found very few changes made to the list I would send.

But the toughest job was preparing the citations. I would have the dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus before me. In some cases, I had the bio-data to guide myself. Mostly they contained a mere cryptic description of the person - whether he was a scientist, an academician or economist. That helped me somewhat, but preparing the citation on that basis was challenging.

The entire process was so haphazard that the Supreme Court had to intervene to ask the government to constitute a selection committee, including the opposition leader as its member. However, some order came to prevail once the committee was in position. Yet, preparing the citation was my task.

The draft gazette notification of names was issued by the Rashtrapati Bhavan. I recollect that once the name of Ms. Lazarus was suggested by the president. We, in the home ministry, knew that the honour had been conferred on the then famous educationist Ms Lazarus. Accordingly, the gazette notification was made public.

But when President Rajendra Prasad saw the notification, he said the name he had suggested was that of a nurse. She had attended to him when he had a bout of asthma when he was travelling to Hyderabad from Karnool in Andhra Pradesh. We were all embarrassed that the honour had been bestowed on the wrong person. But we could do nothing because the name was already in the public domain. That year two Lazarus' were given the awards.

Two years ago, when the Congress was in power, it conferred the Padma Bushan award to the US hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal, despite criminal cases pending against him. There was a furor in the country but the home minister justified his selection on the plea that he was a known Indian who had served the cause of the country abroad. But there are several cases of eminent people refusing to accept the award on the grounds that the panel of selectors was not capable enough to judge their work.  

The lesson to be learnt is whether there should be any such award at all. The experience is that the ruling party tends to give "recognition" to the people who are either members of the party or somehow connected with it. The real purpose is lost, because the recognition is extended to those who are close to the party.

Take, for instance, the case of Sachin Tendulkar. Undoubtedly, he was the best batsman, probably next only to Don Bradman, in the world. But should he have been conferred with the Bharat Ratna when hockey wizard Dyan Chand was not even considered for the honour? The legendary Milkha Singh made an issue when he was chosen for the Arjuna award, as he allegedly refused it saying that he would accept nothing less than the Bharat Ratna, because his son had been bestowed with the award before him.

Among academicians, Romila Thapar, while refusing the Padma Bhushan award, made another point: she wanted to be judged by her peers, and not the bureaucrats sitting at the Home Ministry. The famous sitar maestro Vilayat Khan called it an insult and refused to accept both the Padma Shri and Padma Vibhusan. His argument was that he would not accept an award which was conferred on his juniors who, in his opinion, were less deserving. This only underlines that the story of a wrong time, wrong person and wrong award is eternal. 

This only emphasises the argument that the awards are not given according to merit. This charge will remain because the selection is done by people who are nominated by the government. You can include the opposition leader in the selection panel, but he or she would be in the minority. There should be a debate in the country on the importance of awards. Maybe, they have outlived their utility, which was predominant when we achieved our freedom. 

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.