(Pawan Khera is a political analyst with the Congress party.)The country witnessed a humongous image-building campaign in the last one year in the run up to the Parliament elections which catapulted Narendra Modi from Gujarat to Delhi. He has worked hard to reach where he has. Perhaps the PR overdrive is not needed anymore but self-promotion continues to be the end all and be all of virtually every initiative of this government.
Narendra Modi's PR obsession may come in handy to draw the attention of the nation towards pressing issues like sanitation but the question is that of consistency.
Rajiv Gandhi launched the National Literacy Mission in 1988. As against a campaign, which has built-in constraints, he opted for a mission mode. The entire country was enthused; the government of the day had a well-conceptualized plan of action.
Modi's campaign of cleaning India does not show a road map of institutional sustainability. It is fine to sweep the streets today - but do we know where all that waste went? Where was it dumped? Do we have enough landfills that don't hurt neighborhoods in their catchments? Do we compost plants? Or does he just want us to focus on the photo-ops? Has the back-end of India's waste problem been worked out?
There is other baggage which Modi and the Sangh Parivaar would love to junk but cannot - the baggage of their troubled relationship with the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. For so long during his stint in Gujarat, Modi and the Gandhians in the state shared an icy chill.
With the millstone of RSS ideology around his neck, Narendra Modi cannot succeed in co-opting heroes like Patel and Gandhi who not only abhorred the RSS ideology, but also fought it with passion and commitment. It is difficult for a political party to survive without any heroes to fall back upon. The Sangh Parivaar not only did not participate in India's independence movement, it actually subverted it. Veer Sawarkar's letters of apology to the British are that part of history, which even Dinanath Batra would find difficult to undo. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse ensured that the country would forever see the Parivaar and its affiliates with angry suspicion if not hatred.
The attempts to appropriate the legacy of Sardar Patel through the proposed gigantic statue in Gujarat, of Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan through Modi's Teachers' Day extravaganza, and now of Gandhiji through the sanitation drive need to be seen in this historical backdrop.
Token gestures require token representation too. As part of that, the Prime Minister invited Shashi Tharoor from the Congress party and celebrities to legitimize the appropriation of the Gandhi legacy.
Our civic sense undoes our claims of an ancient culture. The only problem one can have with Prime Minister Modi's cleanliness campaign is that it appears to be at best yet another PR drive and at worst a clever political move to co-opt the Gandhi legacy.
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