At a time when various names being considered for the Bharat Ratna have stoked a controversy, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president M. Karunanidhi has made a strong pitch for conferring the country’s highest civilian award on C. N. Annadurai, party-founder and first non-Congress Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu after Independence.
“He is a great social reformer, great writer, orator and litterateur. His literary and political works, both in Tamil and English, have been acclaimed as one of the best in the State,” Mr. Karunanidhi said in a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday.
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Mr. Karunanidhi, who succeeded Annadurai as Chief Minister in 1969 after his untimely death, said his leader and political mentor fully deserved the honour.
“We understand that the Union government is considering conferment of the Bharat Ratna on some of our national leaders. Anna may be given the award on the Republic Day,” Mr. Karunanidhi said.
When contacted, Anna’s biographer R. Kannan said he was delighted. “One of modern India’s most gifted leaders, Anna symbolises India’s aspirations for ‘unity in diversity.’ He made Tamils tall and India proud. It is my hope that the political parties in Tamil Nadu would unite on this honour to one of its greatest sons,” Mr. Kannan, a senior United Nations Official now in Baghdad, told The Hindu.
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‘It’s redundant’
However, noted historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy, who is with the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), said that conferring awards on leaders who were already recognised and revered by the people was redundant and superfluous. “Nethaji and Ambedkar do not need the award to make them popular.”
In fact, in Tamil Nadu, the former Chief Minister, M.G. Ramachandran, who was a follower and disciple of Annadurai, was posthumously given the award in 1988 by the Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi.
The decision sparked a controversy at that time and the critics accused the Congress government of conferring the award on MGR in anticipation of an alliance with the AIADMK in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. The former President, R. Venkatraman, however, rejected the criticism, saying MGR was a great nationalist.
Though Anna had strongly espoused the cause of a ‘separate Dravida Nadu’ and raised the issue in Parliament, the DMK, under his leadership, subsequently gave up that demand in the wake of the war with China in 1962. “We need to get our [Dravida Nadu] from Pandit Nehru. Not from the Chinese,” he had remarked.
Anna later defended his change of stand, saying: “If we don’t like the one in Delhi will we like the one far away in Peking [now Beijing].”