Of Buddhadeb, Azad and Award
Rejecting or returning official awards is not uncommon in India. What is not often seen is how such recognition sparks divisions in a party, and this came out quite clearly when senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir (when it was a state), was chosen for the Indian government's third highest civilian honour, Padma Bhushan, on the eve of India's Republic Day on January 26.
Azad, the most prominent Muslim face of the Congress party for decades, welcomed his selection for the award, saying it was good to be appreciated for one's public service by a government of the other side of the political divide—a reference to the BJP dispensation headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But Azad's senior party colleague Jairam Ramesh did not agree with him. In fact, within hours of the award announcement, Ramesh took to Twitter to have a dig at Azad. Ramesh contrasted former Chief Minister and Marxist veteran Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's rejection of the same award and had a dig at Azad by playing with words. Terming Bhattacharjee's refusal of the award as "the right thing to do," Ramesh said he "wants to be Azad, not Ghulam."
Officially, the Congress remained silent on the issue, but at least four more senior leaders of the party—Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, and Manish Tewari—welcomed the honour for Azad. It should be noted that Azad, Sharma and Sibal are among a group of 23 Congress leaders who had shot off a letter to Congress' interim President Sonia Gandhi last year demanding organisational overhaul, in a move seen as a veiled attack on the Gandhi family. It is not just the group of 23 Congress leaders who have flayed Ramesh for his dig at Azad. Senior leader Ashwani Kumar described Ramesh's jibe as "a shameful innuendo … intended to rob both the award and its recipient of the deserved dignity."
Two aspects of the political ripples caused in the Congress by the award for Azad stand out: 1) It came at a time when the relations between the BJP and the Congress have touched a new low; and 2) It showed the wide chasm in the grand old party. It needs to be said that Azad shares a warm relationship with Modi. The strongest evidence of this came to the fore in February last year, when Azad retired as a member of Rajya Sabha. Speaking on that occasion, the Indian prime minister had broken down a number of times during his nearly 15-minute speech while recalling his close association with Azad. Looking back, it is difficult to believe that Modi was just being nice to a retiring member, and that his remarks were not a throw-forward to the future.
Unlike the Congress, the CPI (M) was prompt to convey to both Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the media that it had always been against accepting official awards. But the whole exercise came after hectic consultations over phone among the party's top brass and the Bhattacharjee family. The party leaders recalled how its leader EMS Namboodiripad had turned down an offer by the then Congress government headed by PV Narasimha Rao to be named for Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour in India, in the 1990s. It may be recalled that the CPI (M) had in 1996 shot down a move to allow its veteran leader Jyoti Basu as India's prime minister, a decision years later termed by Basu himself as a "Himalayan blunder."
Opposition leaders have in the past made it to the government's awards list. The Narasimha Rao government had chosen former Prime Minister Morarji Desai for India's highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, and another former Prime Minister and BJP's tallest leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee for Padma Vibhushan. India's former President Pranab Mukherjee, who spent his entire political innings in the Congress, was honoured by the Modi government with Bharat Ratna without rumblings in his party in 2019, and Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar with Padma Vibhushan in 2017.
The awards for Azad and Buddhadeb are being seen differently among a section of political observers. According to one view, it could be seen as an attempt by the Modi government to reach out to the opposition parties. The other view is that the political implications can be gauged by the split in Congress, which is already in the grip of factional feud, in reacting to the honour for Azad and a not-so-subtle message to West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress, which had waged a four-year struggle against the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government before replacing it in 2011. The BJP cannot be oblivious to the fact that it had received help from the CPI (M) in shedding its politically untouchable tag in the 1980s, when the top leaders of the two parties, along with some other opposition leaders, shared the dais against the then Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent for The Daily Star. He writes from New Delhi, India.