 "PV Narasimha Rao, MS Swaminathan, Chaudhary Charan Singh, Bharat Ratna")
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement on Friday that former premiers P V Narasimha Rao and Charan Singh along with Green Revolution pioneer M S Swaminathan will be conferred the Bharat Ratna makes 2024 a year in which an unprecedented five people were chosen for the country’s highest civilian award.
Earlier on January 23, Modi announced Bharat Ratna for former Bihar chief minister Karpoori Thakur, a champion of backward empowerment, and L K Advani, a founding member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who led the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement. The choice of each of these five people has substantial political significance for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls and beyond.
Agriculture scientist Swaminathan is considered the father of the Green Revolution, Rao, the progenitor of the 1991 economic reforms while Singh is one of the country’s tallest peasant leaders who continues to be an iconic leader for the Jat community across parts of Rajasthan, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh.
In the context of BJP’s efforts at expanding its electoral footprint in the southern states, party sources pointed out that the move was noteworthy as Rao hailed from Telangana and Swaminathan was a Tamil speaker from Kerala.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar welcomed the Bharat Ratna for Thakur, one of the tallest backward class leaders. The Bharat Ratna paved the way for Kumar's Janata Dal (United) to return to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on January 28. Bihar is crucial for the BJP if it has to repeat its 2019 tally of 303 seats, let alone achieve the prime minister’s goal of winning 370 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP has performed better in Bihar since the mid-1990s on the back of Kumar's support base among the Extremely Backward Class (EBC) voters.
Modi said the Bharat Ratna for Charan Singh was to acknowledge his contribution to the welfare of farmers, his tenure as the chief minister of UP and his fight against the Emergency.
More From This Section
"Dil jeet liya” (you have won our hearts), posted minutes after the announcement on X Singh's grandson, Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president, Jayant Chaudhary. The RLD is set to sever its alliance with the Samajwadi Party and align with the BJP in western UP by February 12, the birth anniversary of Jayant's father Ajit Singh, who was a minister in the governments of Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.
Jayant lost the Baghpat Lok Sabha seat to the BJP's Satyapal Singh by 23,502 votes. The BJP would hope to be perceived as pro-farmer despite the anti-farm laws movement from the Jats of Rajasthan, Haryana and Western UP in 2020-21, forcing the Centre to roll it back in November 2021, months before the UP Assembly polls.
Announcing the Bharat Ratna for Rao, Modi remembered his stint as Andhra Pradesh chief minister and his "visionary leadership" at the country's helm in heralding the economic reforms. Notably, Rao, the first Congress prime minister outside the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, hailed from Telangana, where the BJP won four seats in 2019 but wants to increase its tally. But there is also the fight over Rao's contested legacy that the Congress refused to honour until recently. While he is considered the father of the economic reforms, the Babri Mosque was razed under his watch.
He is India's only prime minister not to have a memorial in the national capital. The Congress leadership did not allow the cortege carrying Rao's body inside Congress headquarters at 24 Akbar Road when he passed away in December 2004. The party, however, rediscovered Rao in recent years and even announced in its Telangana Assembly poll manifesto that it would name a district after him.
The white paper that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled in Parliament on Thursday stated that the UPA leadership "ironically" abandoned the 1991 reforms after coming to power in 2004, while the Modi government pursued the reforms with greater vigour since 2014.
