Bharat Ratna for P V Narasimha Rao: Congress’s Achilles heel, the PM it ‘forgot’

Speaking in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a pointed attack on the Congress. He said the party never considered B R Ambedkar worthy of the Bharat Ratna and kept giving the honour to their “own family members”. He said the Congress, which named parks, streets, and squares after its “family members”, is now giving the BJP advice and lessons on social justice.

The government’s surprise decision to award Bharat Ratna to former PM P V Narasimha Rao of the Congress and earlier to former President Pranab Mukherjee, another Congress leader, fits well into the BJP’s larger political narrative. That the grand old party has always ignored its stalwarts outside the Gandhi family and played down their contributions to the country.

And Rao has always been an Achilles heel for the Congress, given the fraught relations Sonia Gandhi shared with him when the former was Prime Minister. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 under his watch as PM was another sore point. The decision to honour him with Bharat Ratna comes, interestingly, weeks after the opening of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.

The Congress shunned Rao after he demitted office in 1996 after an eventful tenure that not just saw the Babri demolition but also the unshackling of the Indian economy and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) bribery scandal. For years, the Congress refused to acknowledge Rao’s role in opening up the Indian economy, the biggest reforms India has seen since independence.

The Congress in recent years, however, made a conscious attempt to include Rao in the pantheon of Congress icons. It surprised many when Sonia lavished praise on the former PM in 2020, recounting his leadership skills and asserting that the party takes pride in his