Former Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur has been named for Bharat Ratna posthumously. The award was last conferred on late president Pranab Mukherjee in 2019. Of the 49 awards, 15 were conferred posthumously.
Here is a look at all 49 Bharat Ratna awardees till date:
- C. Rajagopalachari – former Governor-General – 1954
- S. Radhakrishnan – former President of India – 1954
- C.V Raman – Nobel laureate and physicist – 1954
- Bhagwan Das – Independence activist, philosopher, and educationist – 1955
- M. Visvesvaraya – Diwan of erstwhile Mysore princely state, civil engineer – 1955
- Jawaharlal Nehru – former Prime Minister – 1955
- Govind Ballabh Pant – Independence activist – 1957
- Dhondo Keshav Karve – social reformer and educator – 1958
- Bidhan Chandra Roy – physician, educationist- 1961
- Purushottam Das Tandon – Independence activist – 1961
- Rajendra Prasad – former President of India – 1962
- Zakir Husain – Independence activist, became President of India after winning award – 1963
- Pandurang Vaman Kane – Indologist and Sanskrit scholar -1963
- Indira Gandhi – former Prime Minister – 1971
- V.V. Giri – former President of India – 1975
- Mother Teresa – founder of the Missionaries of Charity – 1980
- Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan – Independence activist – 1987
- Nelson Mandela – anti-apartheid activist – 1990
- Morarji Desai – former Prime Minister – 1991
- J.R.D Tata – Industrialist – 1992
- Satyajit Ray – Filmmaker – 1992
- Gulzari Lal Nanda – Independence activist – 1997
- A.P.J. Abdul Kalam – former President of India-1997
- M.S. Subbulakshmi – Carnatic classical vocalist – 1998
- Chidambaram Subramaniam – Independence activist – 1998
- Amartya Sen – economist – 1999
- Ravi Shankar sitar player – 1999
- Lata Mangeshkar – playback singer – 2001
- Ustad Bismillah Khan – Hindustani classical shehnai player – 2001
- Bhimsen Gururaj Joshi – Hindustani classical vocalist – 2009
- C.N.R. Rao – chemist and professor – 2014
- Sachin Tendulkar – cricketer – 2014
- Atal Bihari Vajpayee – former Prime Minister – 2015
- Pranab Mukherjee – former President of India – 2019
Posthumous Bharat Ratna
- Lal Bahadur Shastri – former Prime Minister- 1966
- K. Kamraj – former Tamil Nadu chief minister – 1976
- Vinoba Bhave – Independence activist, social reformer -1983
- M.G. Ramachandran – actor and former Tamil Nadu chief minister -1988
- B.R. Ambedkar – social reformer -1990
- Rajiv Gandhi – former Prime Minister of India -1991
- Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel – Independence activist – 1991
- Maulana Abul Kalam Azad – Independence activist -1992
- Aruna Asaf Ali – Independence activist – 1997
- Jayaprakash Narayan – Independence activist, social reformer – 1999
- Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi – Independence activist – 1999
- Madan Mohan Malaviya – scholar and educational reformer – 2015
- Nanaji Deshmukh – social activist – 2019
- Bhupendra Kumar Hazarika – playback singer, lyricist, musician, poet, and filmmaker – 2019
- Karpoori Thakur – former Bihar chief minister – 2024
