13 Dec, 2014
Asia Times Online: The cleansing of India
India is in the throes of the Swacchh Bharat Abhiyan, in other words a campaign to clean India. This, as one has now got to see, has to do with lots of famous people picking up brooms and cleaning streets that are already clean or have been specially littered for the photo-op.
TV advertisements pointing to how Indians dirty the country are being broadcast. The advertisement no doubt captures this Indian spirit to a “T”, but what is interesting is how the advertisement ends. After pointing to our very real littering habits, part of a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi speech is embedded at the end. In this portion of the speech, which is in Hindi, he says that if Indians decide to keep their country clean – then no foreign hand will be able to prevent this from happening.
Where is the need for mention of a bogeyman when the problem and the solution lies in very capable Indian hands?
With a new government in power, the broom being used to clean India is an allegory to the removal of many things. What is being removed are people and other things not ideologically in sync with the current government’s Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) tutored Hindu nationalist revival agenda.
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