Mission Swachh Bharat

While reading Rene Girard’s book Violence and Sacred, I came across a ritual practiced in ancient Israel. This was annually done by the high priest of Israel during the Day of Atonement who on that day brought two goats into the Temple of Jerusalem. He sacrificed one of them to expiate the sins of Israelites while he laid his hand on the other to transfer all the misdeeds of the people on its head and then drove the sin-laden goat out of the city so as to lay the blame elsewhere.  It did not matter if a city other than Jerusalem got afflicted so long as Jerusalem was freed of sins.

I could see a close parallel in our daily ritual of sweeping our household dirt onto the next door. So long as I can make a scapegoat of my neighbour for keeping the colony unclean, I get a triple benefit –of keeping my house clean and at the same time of transmitting the dirty trick onto my neighbor.  I will have a third benefit of holding my head before my colony people as one who has faithfully heeded  PM’s Gandhi Jayanthi call for Swachh Bharat that is now being rechristened "Bal Swachha Mission" to coincide with Chacha Nehru’s  125^th birth anniversary. Bapuji and Chachaji have become the New Age celebrity icons for Mission Swachh(Mission Clean) followed by the reel ambassadors like the famous Khan trio (Salman, Aamir and Sharukh)and Bharat Ratna Sachin Tendulkar besides other famous names. I feel excited wielding the broom and being a part of the greats but I am pretty surreptitious when it comes to deflecting the sweep onto the next door. I do this bit only after the lights are off.  Though there are no photo-ops for me, I feel blissful and great imitating the gestures and actions of celebrity alter egos. “We humans” writes Karen Armstrong in Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence  “are profoundly artificial and tend naturally towards archetypes and paradigms… we continually strive to approximate to an ideal that transcends the day -to -day.”  Appropriating the icons not for some cosmetic product as we see on our tubes, but for a super concept like Swachh Bharat makes us feel connected to super heroes of our history.

The Israeli ritual is something that is genetic with all humans. To blame others for one’s own failure is an everyday happening. Even Nehru’s mighty Congress that stands discredited today tries to blame everyone except its Mother-Son duo for its abysmal show in the 2014 elections. These days parents (now they are being given a further fillip by the CBSE to keep a tab on the teachers) blame the school and the teachers if their wards do not fare well. They strongly believe that their wards are brilliant –(in Tamil we have a proverb “for every  crow, its baby is a golden baby”) -but had been let down by indifferent, incompetent and unconcerned teachers. Parents believe that they can never be wrong; others including the school and the teachers are to be blamed for their children’s misdemeanor.  If I am fired by my employer, I will lay the blame on the employer or my colleagues but certainly I shall  remain unblameworthy. If one overhears the animated conversations among maids in the park, this specific human trait of shoving the blame on others becomes clear. During lunchtime or just before returning home, the maids congregate in the park for a quick roundup of their day’s brushes with their mem-sahebs. Almost everyone has a story to tell and the running bottomline of their story is how gorgonian, vain and foolish the memsahebs were and how angelic, honest and intelligent they(the  maids) were in comparison. Even a roadside conversation (in India we all speak loudly even in public places) will always be about one’s righteousness vis-à-vis the unforgiveable faults of others.. We can see this daily occurrence on the roads when there is an accident involving motor vehicles ; the mistake is only that of the ‘other’. The endless heated argument to apportion the blame for the incident assumes an immediate priority over and above  attending to any physical injury that one might have sustained during the accident. And on the middle of the road, blocking all other movements and vehicles, we hear shouts from either side- what in Hindi we define as the “tu tu ,mein mein” snarl (you and you, me and me)  ‘The Other’ is serves for everyone of us as the receptacle that holds all the ills afflicting us. The concept of the Self requires the existence of the Other. We seem to have imbibed Jean Paul Sartre’s famous line : “Hell is the Others," or, alternatively, "Hell is Other People." ("L'enfer, c'est les Autres.")

With our human frailty towards self-righteousness, can Swachh Bharat become a reality? Can the PM, his ministers, MPs, Tendulkars ,Khans and other celebrities inspire us to work towards a dirt-mukht Bharat? Or will this celebrity sponsored campaign stop with photo-ops and make cleanliness like its equivalent, godliness remain beyond our reach? We have to understand the direct equation between the cleanliness of my house and that of my neighbour. To keep my car clean, I throw out on the road the empty chips packets , the used up water bottles, the cola cans, the chocolate wrappers and other miscellaneous clutter. I take umbrage in the truth that the road is free for all and therefore I have the freedom to litter it. Paan chewing is an integral part of Indian culture and many religious and marriage ceremonies are incomplete without Paan. So the spitting of the Paan-tobacco juice is a common sight painting red the roads, the walls, the dustbins and washbasins kept as spittoons in the dreary corners of government offices, railway stations and bus terminals..  For the Indians spitting and littering are their birthrights and no amount of legislation can rein in their habit acquired as a part of their culture. So is the pollution of our rivers including the holy Ganga as we feel the right to drown the idols of Durga and Ganesha in them as well as pollute them with Industrial waste, human waste and other religious rituals that involve throwing in flowers, leaves and other things

Mission Swachh Bharat  is a more herculean task than an Army’s Mission statement. It needs the primary cleaning of the notional cobwebs in our minds of our  right to dirty followed by educating the people on the concept of neighbourhood and environmental cleanliness. Above all we need to understand the French poet Rimbaud’s line: "Je est un autre" (I is an other) which acknowledges “one’s undifferentiated human substance or collectivity”, Swachh Bharat is a possibility-albeit remote- if we realize that Swachh Bharat is not merely Bapuji’s Bharat or Chacha Nehruji’s Bharat but it is your Bharat and my Bharat.