Bharat Ratna candidates
MEN, MATTERS & MEMORIES

By M L Kotru

Sushri Mayawati Behnji is angry. Very angry indeed. And why shouldn't she be ? After all how many Behnjis has the country known before. The Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Elected to UP's chief ministerial gaddi with a whopping majority. Which has left the Samajwadis, the ‘bhagwa’ pariwaris, and, of course, that fast sinking entity called Congress feel so unwanted, almost irrelevant in the UP context. Add that the two to seven percent of the total votes polled by her BSP in some of the States which went to polls recently.

Can't you see it, stupid. Behnji is already seeing herself on her way to becoming the country's second woman Prime Minister, after Indira Gandhi. How dare you forget that she did receive her political ‘diksha’ from none other than Manyawar Kanshi Ram, visionary who saw the rise of Dalit power like no one else had before him. Kanshi Ram was her mentor and she, initially, was like putty in his deft hands.

It was his mantra to her that made her swerve from her once upon a time ambition to join the country's civil service. Remember, it was Kanshi Ram who advised her against it, urging her instead to join him in his political crusade. If she joined the IAS she would have to be in attendance whenever a political boss came a visiting, even if she was a District Collector. She would like hundreds of other Government officials always be expected to say ‘‘Yes, Mantri ji’’, no matter what the Mantri said.

How right the Manyawar had been ! And how could she be ungrateful to the memory of the man who had shown her the path, guided her all the way to high office. And Mayawati was so possessive of the Manyawar that when he was bedridden, leading to his eventual death, she stood by him, meeting all the expenses, as she often said, of the old man's long ordeal in hospital. That's why she had not even allowed the Manyawar's family members to meet him for the greater part of his hospitalisation. She wouldn't share Kanshi Ram's legacy with anyone. And, think, of the crores she has already earmarked to raise the Manyawar's statues in Uttar Pradesh for starters. It's another matter that apart from Dr B R Ambedkar, she has also ensured that her own statues too stand alongside those of the two ‘‘maha purshas’’.

And why on earth should there be any raised eye-brows when she does no more than ask for the conferment of Bharat Ratna on such a great man. Kanshi Ram, as Behnji would have it, is among the tallest of our leaders. It's another matter that the thought occured to her only after the Bharatiya Janata Party's ‘‘iron-man’’ L K Advani had written to the Prime Minister to award Bharat Ratna to his erstwhile, now semi-retired leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Does it really matter if some see in Advani's request much more than that meets the eye ? The BJP has already announced Advani as its Prime Ministerial candidate in any future poll and the ‘‘iron man’’ perhaps wanted to ensure that the octogenarian (Advani has also entered that golden age now) is out of the way by getting him the ultimate accolade, Bharat Ratna. The Marxists too were not able to resist the temptation and asked for a ‘‘Ratna’’ for the nonogenarian party patriarch, Jyoti Basu.

The man who missed the country's Prime Ministership by a whisker because of his party's obduracy, promptly withdrew from the Ratna contention. His partymen quickly realised the folly of their action and were quicker enough to take the high moral ground. They would not wish Comrade Jyoti Basu to accept such an award from a awovedly capitalist Government. Incidentally, the party supports the self-same Government at the Centre.

Going by what one hears the BJP, having floated the idea, is unlikely to make an issue of it except, of course, to embarrass Manmohan Singh. For, all said and done, Vajpayee is one of those politicians who regardless of his parivar links, is generally liked by people all over the country. At a personal level though the BJP may have done a disservice to Vajpayee by asking for a Bharat Ratna for him. The BJP couldn't have been unaware of the fact that Bharat Ratna is conferred on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. And Dr Manmohan Singh, the good man that he may be, is not a free agent. His party and its leader, Sonia Gandhi wouldn't countenance such an honour for Vajpayee, the BJP leader, in what is likely to be an election year.

To go by the list of men and women who have received the award so far one clearly discerns political manipulation as an important part of the process of selecting the awardees. One of the most blatantly political awards made in this context was the one to M G Ramachandran, the late Tamilnadu Chief Minister. It was a desperate attempt by Indira Gandhi to win a few brownie points among the Tamils. His pre-eminence as a Tamil film star certainly did not warrant the award. Nor did the record of the Government of Tamilnadu headed by him. His Government was as corrupt as any other State Government in the Union and indeed he may not have set the tone for his successors including Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi.

I was amused the other night watching a heated debate on one of the networks on the Bharat Ratna awards. The most amusing part of it concerned one Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who someone noticed had not been awarded Bharat Ratna even posthumously. It would have been the greatest insult to the memory of the Mahatma to have his name bracketed with some of the existing recipients. Gandhi, I remember did accept a British award-Kaiser-e-Hind or something like that for his work as a medical attendant during the Boer War in South Africa. He was a practising barrister in that country at the time and had already sown the seeds of his movement against colour-based racial discrimination. Needless to say the award was returned. Gandhi's influence on the country may appear to be dying but look at it my way : Munnabhai Lage Raho; the film tells it all.

Back to Behnji and her war cry. I don't see the UPA Government meeting her demand on behalf of her Manyawar. The simple reason is that politically it would be inexpedient for the Congress Party to say ‘yes’. She has predictably threatened to withdraw her support to the UPA. But given all her ‘‘might’’ she would desist from doing anything that might force the Congress Party to revive the bagful of cases pending against her, some still under investigation and others subjudice. But you can trust Mayawati to try to brazen it out. Like, she has gone on record in the past admitting that she accepts money from prospective candidates whenever there is a poll. All of it goes to the party. She expects her MLAs and MPs to part with some of the emoluments they receive on her birthdays which she believes is a token of appreciation by partymen and sympathisers. She may have acquired a whole range of properties, again worth crores, but all of it belongs to the party. Her latest birthday bash, spread over two days and two different venues in Delhi, may have had roads blocked but there is no way stopping her and the cash gifts that flowed in.

Stopping her or saying ‘no’ to her can spell trouble. Many UP bureaucrats will testify to that. Take last week's token demonstration by some Samajwadi Party workers in Madhya Pradesh when she was on a visit: a furious Mayawati asked the UP Director General of Police to dismiss her entire Security detail. Its fault: 20 odd SSP workers had dared to show her black flags. She had previously asked for SPG Security, granted to no Chief Minister so far, and is angry that the Centre has turned down the request.

While on Bharat Ratna I wonder how long we are going to allow the saffron goons to continue their campaign of villification against India's most outstanding painter of all times, M F Hussain. The world may have come to acknowledge the 92-year-old maestro as one of the great Asian painters of modern times but the saffronites will have none of it. Why ? Because he had painted a nude ‘‘Bharat Mata’’.

Dozens of cases have been slapped on him and you can never tell how many more will come up and when. This, when a higher court has ordered the lumping together of all cases against the painter, filed in almost all the major BJP-ruled States. The man must meanwhile continue to live in exile because the saffronites have threatened to kill him, cut off his hands a la the Islamic fundamentalists.

In any civilised society men like the saffronites would have been consigned to the nearest asylum on grounds of insanity. For, insanity it is for these Hindu fundamentalists to attack the Ahmedabad-based office of a premier TV channels simply because it listed M F Hussain's name among the likely candidates for Bharat Ratna. The artiste was mentioned alongwith four others and the channel was taking a poll of sorts. This annoyed the saffronites who promptly vandalised the Ahmedabad office of the channel. Thirtysix hours after the attack the police in Narendra Modi's Gujarat had yet to arrest the culprits although their identities were for the most part known. Hussain must meanwhile continue to shuttle between Dubai and London.