Nehru's Bharat Ratna and India's Sedition Law

A tangential connection

Listening to this Puliyabaazi podcast on India’s sedition law put into my mind the story of Nehru “giving himself” the Bharat Ratna, for rather tangential reasons that I hope will connect up soon.

Untangling the Sedition vs. Freedom of Expression Debate राजद्रोह बनाम अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता

The defence of Nehru giving himself the award is that it wasn’t Nehru. The story goes that it was a plot hatched and executed by the president, Rajendra Prasad, while Nehru was visiting Europe. Apparently Prasad took the decision unilaterally, without consulting the cabinet, and surprised Nehru by announcing it at a meeting; and once the announcement had flown out of the President’s lips, there was no courteous way to decline the award.

I find the story tough to believe, but that is beside the point. The problem is that, given the evidence available, it is impossible to rule out the alternative explanation, which is that some sycophants in Nehru’s government decided to flatter Nehru by honouring him with a Bharat Ratna, and that they proposed this route to either Nehru or the President. The President would naturally find it difficult to speak against the idea without seeming like he was belittling Nehru. Obviously they would do it without leaving a paper trail in the form of a cabinet recommendation.

Now, let’s say that you are Nehru. You are the first prime minister of a recently established republic. It would seem obvious to me that every action you take should be guided by the question of what example you are setting for the republic in the long term. You should recognise that it is inevitable that a perception that the prime minister gave himself an award would form. Even if in this instance it was the president’s unilateral decision, it sets the template for a future prime minister to give herself an award, as indeed his daughter did many years later.

In short, other than a dubious boost in prestige, there was nothing to be gained from accepting the award. One could argue that declining the award, even after it was offered to him, would have brought him greater glory and admiration.

Accepting the Bharat Ratna tells me that Nehru was not in fact guided in his thinking by the question of what is for the long-term good of the republic. This is a small example, but by no means do I believe that it is an isolated one, and I don’t think that it was confined to Nehru alone, which brings me to the sedition law.

This is a law that had been used to imprison stalwarts of the freedom struggle such as Tilak and Gandhi for speaking their mind. Our founders had the opportunity to put guardrails that would prevent future tyrants from misusing it. Even if they were not thinking of the long term they had the opportunity to engage in the symbolism of striking down a hated British-era law.

The founders of the United States, when faced with a similar opportunity, put in a provision in their constitution that made it all but impossible to prosecute someone for treason. The founders of the Indian republic, by contrast, decided that they would always be in power, so Indians could just chill.