Modi with broom just a gimmick: Congress

Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala unit of the Congress has dismissed the Swachh Bharat Mission as a gimmick of Prime Minister Narendra Modi using a broom.

Addressing reporters Friday after a day-long party meeting held here, state Congress president V.M. Sudheeran said if Modi was serious in his clean campaign programme, then he would not have taken this route.

He said: "Modi standing with a broom is only a gimmick. Instead, if he was serious, he should have first called a meeting of all the national parties, then he should have called on every chief minister in the country. Then there should have been a joint centre-state initiative and that's how a national campaign is launched and not by what he did, sweeping for the TV channels."

This was Sudheeran's response when asked if the state party was right in demanding action against Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor for deciding to accept the Swachh Bharat Mission challenge of Modi.

Tharoor ran into trouble soon after he accepted Modi's challenge and in a week's time, following a complaint from the Kerala unit of the Congress party, the national leadership removed him from the panel of party spokespersons.

Modi had launched the campaign to clean India Oct 2, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, aiming to achieve a completely clean India by Oct 2, 2019 to mark the 150th birth anniversary of the father of the nation.