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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bharat Ratna/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Laser brain via FACBot (talk) 14:26, 6 July 2016 [1].


Bharat Ratna

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Nominator(s): - Vivvt (Talk) 04:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about India's highest civilian award. Instituted in 1954, the award is bestowed upon 45 recipients and has been surrounded by several controversies. The article is copyedited by a GoCE member (@Blackmane:) and has undergone a peer review. Looking forward to see some constructive comments. - Vivvt (Talk) 04:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Fowler&fowler This is a premature submission. I'm surprised that it was granted Good Article status. There is no point in wasting the time of conscientious editors by asking them to read an article large parts of which need to be rewritten, reduced, and made free both of political points of view and of repetition. The nominator should work with some editors from the league of copy-editors as well as from WP:India, to rewrite, and to resubmit later. It will be a good thing if the reviewer who granted it Good Article status will explain why he or she did so. Please do not ask me to explain more. If the WAC officials decide my comments are not actionable, so be it, but this really is nowhere near FA class. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 19:54, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some comments by Fowler&fowler:
    • The claim in the lead, which is repeated in the controversy section, that India's first prime minister nominated himself for this award is sourced to some recent sources, which are not reliable, at least not for an FA class article. More reliable, contemporary, sources described it as something different. Here is one: Singhvi, Laxmi Mall; Sarkar, Bidyut Kumar (1956), India: Government and Politics, Human Relations Area Files, South Asia Project, University of California, p. 366 Quote: "... many politically-conscious Indians are convinced that future historians will not miss the tangible significance of Mr. Nehru's role in contemporary history. This confidence was expressed when India's President Rajendra Prasad, in July 1955, took the "unconstitutional" (i.e., without the Prime Minister's recommendation) step of conferring on Nehru the title of Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), the highest award the Indian Republic can offer. (p 366)" Fowler&fowler«Talk» 23:43, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • The speech of Indian president Rajendra Prasad delivered on the occasion of Nehru receiving the Bharat Ratna confirms that it was he (Prasad) who nominated Nehru without the latter's knowledge. See: Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Correspondence and Select Documents: Volume Seventeen. Presidency Period January 1954 to December 1955, Allied Publishers, 1984, pp. 455–456, ISBN 978-81-7023-002-1 Quote: "I have felt that I can do no better than conferring on him the award of Bharat Ratna which is the highest award of honour that we have. In doing so, for once, I may be said to be acting unconstitutionally, as I am taking this step on my own initiative and without any recommendation or advice from my Prime Minister; but I know that my action will be endorsed most enthusiastically not only by my Cabinet and other Ministers but by the country as a whole."
Since this will not available to everyone, I will copy the entire speech on Talk:Bharat Ratna. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:21, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Fowler&fowler: With your post comment edits on the article, it looks like you have objection with the controversies related to Gandhis as you have simply deleted the particulars. The similar concern was brought to the article's talk page by 5-edits user a month ago. When asked for the online source for the claim, the user has not yet come back with the details. Interestingly, you have raised the same concern but provided the source, which is good in a way. This particular source about Prasad's speech should be considered as a primary one and should be backed by one or more secondary sources, per WP:PRIMARY. The content that was deleted by you was published in various contemporary reliable sources/newspapers like The Hindu, Telegraph, Outlook India etc. and thus cannot be and shall not be deleted outrightly. Rather, post your source, we may need to rephrase the content to put forward both the sides.
About Indira Gandhi awarding herself, none of your sources provide any support to your claim. So that definitely should be restored back. Unless you have source to support it. There are various books and sources available which labels her action as "patting-her-own-back". - Vivvt (Talk) 13:47, 22 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Vivvt: Who are the Gandhis, in the plural, in this instance? It is Mr Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs Indira Gandhi. I picked them because they were right there in the lead. I then looked for evidence in the Criticism section, whose first paragraph I removed because it was entirely sourced to op-ed pieces or memoirs in newspapers written by unknown people (i.e. people with no scholarly antecedent in the historiography of Mr Nehru, Mrs Gandhi, or the Bharat Ratna). Wikipedia is fairly clear that "Editorial commentary, analysis and opinion pieces, whether written by the editors of the publication (editorials) or outside authors (op-eds) are ... are rarely reliable for statements of fact. When taking information from opinion content, the identity of the author may help determine reliability. The opinions of specialists and recognized experts are more likely to be reliable and to reflect a significant viewpoint." In other words, this is not a significant viewpoint. Also, the claim about the Right to Information query (RTI) is mentioned in no op-ed piece you have cited. The information released in the RTI queries, in any case, as @Sitush: has observed, "would most likely be tailored very specifically to the questions asked, which could significantly skew results. (See here.)" Predictably, upon an on-line search I could find evidence of only one RTI, written up, replete with photograph, in a guest story by a reader with one name, in a dubiously partisan web newspaper, which seemed to be nothing but a case in point (of Sitush's observation).
How did you manage to keep that claim in the article when all you had were Indian newspapers opinions making that claim, but providing no evidence from a primary source for it? In other words, other than saying that Mr Nehru awarded himself the BR, where is the evidence of any primary source (a handwritten or typewritten note from the PM to the president, a memo, a telegram, a record of a phone call) in these newspaper stories? You will need to produce a scholarly secondary source, such as I have produced above, from the University of California, Berkeley, publication. I included the Rajendra Prasad speech in full because the Berkeley publication refers to it. I have now also added, on the article's talk age, a Times of India front-page story from, July 16, 1955, the day following the award, and a shorter New York Times mention, both confirming that Mr Nehru had no previous knowledge of the award. As for the Indira Gandhi claim, you will still need to produce a scholarly source for that as well in a Featured Article. One of your sources, The Hindu opinion piece, in fact, suggests the opposite: "it is generally believed that it was the then President, V. V. Giri, who had suo motu decided to award a Bharat Ratna to Indira Gandhi after the Bangladesh war." Fowler&fowler«Talk» 00:09, 24 June 2016 (UTC) Updated. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:28, 24 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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