Congress MP and former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, who had invited the wrath of his party by accepting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to join his Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan, on Saturday formal joined the mission by inaugurating and leading a waste-removal initiative at Vizhinjam village in his Thiruvananthapuram constituency.
Though he claimed that the drive he inaugurated was not part of the Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan and that cleaning the country was not the “patented responsibility” of any particular individual or group, Tharoor made it amply clear that he was indeed responding to Modi’s call by saying that politics need not come in the way of making the country clean.
“There is no need of any controversy,” Tharoor said while talking to newsmen after inaugurating the drive. “Social reformer Narayana Guru had said that man should be good irrespective of what religion he belonged to. Similarly, I am saying that we should work for the betterment of the country irrespective of our politics,” he added.
Stating that the former Vajpayee government, UPA regime and the current NDA Government had given different names to their respective cleanliness missions, Tharoor said names were unimportant but what was important was the cleanliness of the nation. Gandhi’s message was that democracy could attain perfection only through cleanliness, he said.
The Congress MP had come fully prepared for the cleanliness drive at Vizhinjam of which he himself was the organizer. As the programme had been planned much in advance, many of his loyalists from the Congress party had accompanied him.
Tharoor's act on Saturday was indicative of his determination to take up the Clean India challenge the Prime Minister had thrown at him despite the disciplinary action the national congress leadership had taken against him by removing him as party spokesman for tweeting, "Honoured to accept the invitation of PM@narendramodi to join Clean India campaign."
The Congress high command had taken action against Tharoor following pressures from the Kerala PCC. Several Congress leaders in Kerala had gone even to the extent of asking Tharoor to decide whether to continue in the party even. Observers now say that Tharoor, through his Saturday act, was perhaps telling the Kerala leaders that he would not bow to their pressure.
A senior journalist from a pro-Congress newspaper said Tharoor was perhaps trying to force the PCC leadership to ask for more stringent action against him. “I think he has already come to a decision. It should be noted that he has not so far expressed any regret over the things which had led to his removal as party spokesman,” he pointed out.
Tharoor had the other day made it clear that he did not care for politics in matters of development.