Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan: I feel honoured not to be invited, says Mani Shankar Aiyar

NEW DELHI: Senior Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar took a dig at his colleague Shashi Tharoor, saying unlike Tharoor who felt "honoured to accept the invitation" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be one of the nine chosen brand ambassadors of the Swachh Bharat campaign, he feels honoured not to be invited by Modi.

According to Aiyar, the national cleanliness campaign, launched by Modi on Gandhi Jayanthi day, "ignores the fundamental Gandhian proposition" on carrying out sanitation mission in India. "Although Shashi Tharoor felt honoured to be invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I am honoured not to be invited. Because, the Swachh Bharat campaign ignores the fundamental Gandhian proposition that it should be run through, and by the panchayats, in close association with gram sabhas," Aiyar told ET.

Aiyar, a former Union Cabinet Minister for Panchayati Raj, also argues that Modi’s high-profile national campaign without the involvement of panchayats and gram sabhas, could reduce the sanitation campaign to mere tokenism and photo-ops for the Prime Minister.

"Ignoring the panchayats amounts to reducing the campaign to tokenism. For, after all, why has Modi not taken into consideration the vast amount of research literature which shows the biggest lacuna in the total sanitation campaign and the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was the low motivation at the micro level of the community and the households to make toilets at homes and actually use them," he said.

Aiyar feels a sanitation campaign, driven entirely by the bureaucracy, could suffer from ignorance and prejudices. "As TR Raghunandan of Accountability Initiative recounts, when an Orissa government official was asked why people are relieving themselves on the roadside, the official’s reply was ‘people believe it is unhygienic to relieve themselves at home because God lives in the homes’. That's the kind of ignorance and prejudices that have to be tackled to achieve a Swachh Bharat," Aiyar said.