The document summarizes the views of the first three recipients of the Bharat Ratna award in 1954 - C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and C.V. Raman. It discusses their views on independence and the challenges facing the new nation. It also analyzes how some of their warnings about corruption, inequality, and a lack of work ethic have come true today. The document expresses concern that rising intolerance could undermine India's secular democratic values and institutions.

1. FIRST THREE BHARAT RATNA’S
VIEWS
Col Mukteshwar Prasad(Retd) on inputs from Raghavan

2. Commonality
 Three Indians were decorated with the Bharat Ratna in the very first year — 1954( the
year civilian awards were instituted):
 The elder statesman, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari,
 The vice- president, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and
 The Nobel laureate, C.V. Raman.
 No one said at the time that
 All three were south Indian,
 All three Brahmins.
 Their pre-eminence was manifest.
 They accepted the decoration with respect and went about their work according to their
lights.
 All three had a Calcutta connection.
 CR had served as the first governor ofWest Bengal,
 The other two had taught, with distinction and dedication, at the University of
Calcutta.
 “ Om krato smara kritam smara”, the Isha Upanishad tells us.
 The work alone is to be remembered, the work alone.

3. What they had to say about country and the people
 CR a prisoner of the raj in 1921,holed up inVellore Jail wrote in his jail diary:
 “We all ought to know that Swaraj will not at once or, I think, even for a long
time to come, be better government or greater happiness for the people.
Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of
wealth, and inefficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as soon as
freedom is given to us. Men will look regretfully back to the old regime of
comparative justice, and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest
administration.The only thing gained will be that as a race we will be saved
from dishonour and subordination.”
 This was a full quarter century before swaraj was attained.

4. What they had to say about country and the people
 Radhakrishnan member of the constituent assembly on the midnight of August 14/15,
1947 when, with Jawaharlal Nehru,made a speech of surpassing value.
 Reminding the nation of “our national faults of character, our domestic despotism,
obscurantism, narrow-mindedness, superstitious bigotry”, he said almost exactly what
CR had said 25 years earlier.
 Radhakrishnan’s words: “Our opportunities are great but let me warn you that
when power strips ability, we will fall on evil days… From tomorrow morning
— from midnight today — we can no longer throw the blame on the British.
We have to assume the responsibility ourselves for what we do. A free India
will be judged by the way in which it will serve the interests of the common
man in the matter of food, clothing, shelter and the social services. Unless we
destroy corruption in high places, root out every trace of nepotism, love of
power, profiteering and black-marketing which have spoiled the good name of
this great country in recent times, we will not be able to raise the standards of
efficiency in administration…”
 That was said at the very moment free India was born.

5. What theY had to say about
country and the people
 Similarly C.V. Raman observation to young Indians is an agnatic cousin of CR’s
and SR’s: “Success can only come to you by courageous devotion to the
task lying in front of you and there is nothing worth in this world that
can come without the sweat of our brow. I can assert without fear of
contradiction that the quality of the Indian mind is equal to the
quality of anyTeutonic, Nordic or Anglo-Saxon mind.What we lack is
perhaps courage, what we lack is perhaps driving force which takes
one anywhere.We have, I think, developed an inferiority complex. I
think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist
spirit…”

6. Result Today
 Today, those three Bharat Ratnas would have been saddened to see their apprehensions
and prognoses coming true.
 Generalizations are wrong but who can deny that efficiency of administration is not
India’s best introduction ?
 Who can deny that our elections have brought us a great stature in the world but have
also brought corruption?
 And where is the doubt that the power and tyranny of wealth — CR’s startling phrase —
rules the land?
 Power, political and monetary power, outstrips ability by a long measure.
 And corruption in high places — Radhakrishnan’s astonishingly prescient expression —
has disfigured the image of our public life.
 As for the sweat of the brow, Raman’s ideal, that has long since ceased to be valued,
especially in oneself.
 The concept of hard work, of service, of what used to be called pride in one’s work, is
now an archaism.

7. Result Today
 Except in our gifted artisans who survive miraculously, in our armed forces, in the body of
farm labourers across the country and in a few remarkable professions like those of
nurses and teachers, ‘work ethic’ is a national casualty.
 We seek to derive the maximum advantage from the minimum effort.
 There is a mentality, widespread if not omnipresent, which sees the plodder as a fool, the
successful shirker as clever.
 It only follows that the man or woman who is honest with money is regarded as naïve, to
be pitied and the crook who gets caught making illegal money as unlucky.
 It is the honest politician, by which I mean one who does not encash files, sell favours,
turn opportunities of service into ATMs, and there still are many of those, who keeps us in
hope.
 It is, likewise, the exceptional official, doing the work of a hundred, who keeps the
administrative machine from collapsing.Thank god there are some such exceptional men
and women, still, amidst us.
 But by and large, the surface density of work-shirking, responsibility-dodging, blame-
shifting, back-biting, tale-carrying and, alas, palm-itchy laggards has swelled beyond
belief.

8. Result Today
 What we are, the State is.
 Radhakrishnan also spoke of intolerance .
 This trait takes many forms but nowhere more seriously than in politics.
 Ironically and paradoxically, the denominationally intolerant are being projected as
administratively able.
 Those with a questionable secular integrity are said to be men of unquestionable financial
integrity.
 The first three Bharat Ratnas foresaw more than ordinary mortals can.
 But even they could not foresee the self-contradictory piquancy of our predicament
today.
 The liberal Indian, the Indian with a secular conscience, an innately democratic
instinct, a value for civil rights, is shown up as effete , a political pansy, whereas the
macho rattler of sabres, is offered to the nation as its saviour.
 A country with its work ethic weakened, its abilities outstripped by narrow self-interests,
and its domination by the power and tyranny of wealth well-nigh complete, is easily
persuaded to say ‘give us a benign dictator’.

9. Result Today
 Fascism comforts the sloth of mind, the slow of thought, the valuationally
sluggish.
 Fascism excites the timid, the languid and the bored.
 And so we are seeing rise in the very heart of a democratic but languorous India
a poison plume of the most corrosive intolerance.
 In the coming months the nation will be obsessed with who will ‘make it’ to the
Lal Qila next August 15.That is only natural.
 But we should be agonizing about what kind of flag will be unfurled on its
ramparts — the great national tricolour or one with a skull and crossed bones
sewn behind it.