PM rally leaves trail of trash

Ravi Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Gurdaspur, January 5

If Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the man who initiated the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan from Rajghat in 2014 with the widely publicised slogan “na gandagee dalenge, na dalne denge”, gets a chance to return to the venue where he addressed a rally on Thursday, he will find that his much-hyped flagship programme has been derailed by his own party men. Sources claim there are no chances of garbage being cleared immediately because of the “lack of interest” of BJP workers.

Punjab BJP president Shwait Malik said, “It was a massive gathering and such things are bound to happen no matter how hard we try to avoid them. I have instructed my workers to clear the junk so that out political opponents do not get a chance to make an issue out of it,” he said. However, Malik is already too late to stop the BJP’s arch rivals from making a statement because Congress men have launched a scathing attack on the campaign.

Gurdaspur Congress MLA Barindermeet Singh Pahra, who took a round of the venue, said, “It is the BJP which is in the forefront of taking forward the campaign but unfortunately the party does not seem to be listening to its own PM.”

Cabinet minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa said he was dismayed when somebody sent him photographs showing trash littered all over the place. “Clearly, four and a half years down the line, the drive remains unfruitful,” he said.

“When the campaign started, Modi picked up a broom at a New Delhi neighbourhood to launch one of the most ambitious civic programmes but the Gurdaspur rally shows how insensitive the BJP is to its own leader’s crusades,” said Amardeep Singh Cheema, a Batala resident and former director of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR). “Official figures prove that Rs 530 crore has been spent on the campaign on advertisements in the print and visual media. The campaign is nothing except a ploy to defraud tax payers of their hard earned money,” he said.