BHARAT RATNA --- WILL IT DEMEAN THE TRINITY?

Not all are amenable to the idea that the trinity of heroes ought to be awarded the Bharat Ratna for they feel that it will reduce them in public estimation to the level of Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi. I have written copiously my defence against this charge but seemingly to not much effect. These venerable ones hold on to the idea that the conferring of the Bharat Ratna will demean these builders of our freedom. I solicit your response without reservations.

I, for one, feel that the very movement will generate public enthusiasm for the cause and inspire interest in these redoubtable revolutionaries, now lying in relative oblivion thanks to official unconcern and public preoccupation with the material imperatives of life.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Einstein did not lower his status by any stretch of imagination despite the fact that other awardees were nowhere near his level in terms of scientific attainment. Not all Nobel Peace Prizes have been well given but the likes of Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King (Jr.) have in receiving the prize rather raised its status instead of themselves having been lowered by its conferment.

Bagha Jatin, Rash Behari Bose and Masterda Surya Sen stand preeminent in their revolutionary sacrificial glory which no decoration can do justice to. But the point is not that. Like the worship of God in the image does not do justice to His impersonal infinitude and the worshipper does the ritual act of seeking forgiveness for the same, yet, continues with his worship, for culture demands it as a social and psychological imperative that contributes to the maintenance of character in the polity, so also, the conferring of the Bharat Ratna individually to the three revolutionaries, despite being not the best way to remember them, perhaps, is, nonetheless, a national need at a time when sinister forces are plotting their eventual demise from public memory, and we seek their forgiveness for any unintended offence that may thus attend on them.

The award will bring a near-forgotten chapter of the freedom movement, one that played the most crucial role in liberating India from colonial fetters, back into the limelight and inspire a generation of young learners to take up its study and do research into the actual causes of our achieving freedom. Thus, the simple act of decorating the heroes will open up the Pandora's Box wherein lie buried the remains of our revolutionaries to rot away to oblivion. Must we allow it? No, we will not. And herein lies the significance of the motion we are crusading for.