Bharat Ratna for Madam Mayawati

My suggestion to give Mayawati a Bharat Ratna has not been liked by the miniscule number of people who read it. Now let me explain why I think no lady ever in the history of this great nation deserved it more.

Let me tell you a story of a remarkable man born in 1921 into an unremarkable family in Equatorial Africa, then colonized by the French.

Bokassa of Central Africa was born to village chief Mindogon Mgboundoulou in a small part of Central Africa. The French killed his father when he refused to pay the taxes that his village had run up under the tyrannical French system. Bokassa went to a small Christian mission school in his village and soon excelled in his studies especially in French grammar, developing a love for a book written by grammarian Jean Bedel. His white teachers at the mission lovingly started calling him Jean Bedel Bokassa.

The man joined the army, took part in missions, earned the praise of the French and his native Africans and along with some cousins made himself handy to the then president of the Central African Republic, one unremarkable Dacko. In 1966 he took over as president when Dacko was abroad. The French thought that a man so steeped in the love of France should not be much of a problem so did not interfere. Bokassa continued to be President till 1976. He had made himself the President for Life.

He married 17 times and had 50-odd children from them. His reign was so brutal that once when impoverished school children protested against an expensive set of uniforms they had to purchase from one of his wives’ companies, he personally led a battalion on the road to cane the kids. A whopping 103 children died, their brains lying on the streets which had turned a shade of deep crimson. In his decade long rule, it is estimated that almost a million people were killed and very brutally at that since he loved each and every death to be a warning to future dissidents.

In 1977, knowing that the French were loving his gifts of diamonds for its president and his wife and uranium for its nuclear reactors, Bokassa declared that he was a incarnation of the French general Napolean and so was taking over as king of the Central African Republic (CAR) which would henceforth be called the Great Central African Empire.

So excessive was the coronation ceremony that France had to send troops and aircrafts to protect the nation because every CAR soldier was on leave getting himself fitted into costumes like the ones worn during the coronation of Napoleon. Bokassa used all the gold reserves available in his country to make a massive eagle-headed throne of almost 20 tonnes of solid gold.

His Napoleonic attire took away the entire budget for the capital city Bangui for over a year what with its real diamonds and gold weaves. The coronation ceremony, a huge affair with hundreds of limousines, chariots, people in Napoleonic costumes, diamond tiaras, crowns of gold cost the CAR almost five years of every penny the nation earned and got as grants from countries like the French. Every single penny that the republic had taken as loans from countries far and wide was used up in a single day. Statues of Bokassa were ordered across every village in CAR. People were asked to work at parks that would recreate his greatness and how the Lord- Bokassa was a devout Catholic- ensured that the great Napoleon was re-born in the Great Central African Empire.

Kids were dying by the thousands every month but parents were not allowed to take leave from working at the huge parks and farms Bokassa had created and named after himself. All he told the people was to ensure that the Europeans would one day leave their nations and come to become subjects of the great Central African Empire. A mixture of religion, propaganda, and amazing sense of ego propelled Bokassa till the French could take it no more and invaded the nation and forced Bokassa to run away from the country.

He died in 1996 in the CAR- he was allowed to return since- but not before claiming to foreign newspapers that he was the 13th apostle and Pope John Paul II was regularly asking his advise on matters of religion.

Coming back to Mayawati, Bokassa did all this in a nation the size of Texas with a population less than that from Churchgate to Andheri. It is such a sorry nation that the United Nations Development Index pegged it as the 179th poorest nation in a list of 182.

But Mayawati is doing a bit of Bokassa in Uttar Pradesh, and I really don’t think we have become a banana republic as yet.

Our judicial system is still fairly good, we do have elections, the parliament is not full of crooks, and one still can’t get away with murder in most cases than some.

In such a scenario, if Mayawati can manage to be a chief minister who spent a billion dollars on her own statues, and wear mutli-crore garlands in massive maha-rallies which are just sober versions of Bokassa’s coronation, then I believe the lady deserves the Bharat Ratna. And we should simply shut up and hang our head in shame and allow the lady to be one day crowned as the Queen Empress of India.