A political war breaks out over the icon of peace

New Delhi: 150 years after his birth, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is at the centre of a political wrangle with both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress trying to appropriate his legacy. Whose Gandhi is he? Both the BJP and the Congress have held top-level meetings to discuss how to commemorate October 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi and have chalked out their respective plans to claim and reclaim the legacy of the Mahatma.
Is the assimilation of legends of the freedom struggle into its ethos, part of the RSS-BJP agenda to rewrite its own history as well as deliver a ‘Congress-mukt’ Bharat, as they have been promising, to the masses and render the Congress meaningless in the current milieu, whereas the Grand Old Party (GOP) continues to refuse to see beyond the figures ‘the first Congress family’ has thrown up? The BJP has the first mover advantage: Soon after coming to power in 2014, Narendra Modi declared war on filth from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Highlighting Mahatma Gandhi’s view that “Sanitation is more important than Independence”, Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission on October 2, 2014 to tackle the sanitation and waste management problems.
Matatma Gandhi has been the overarching theme of both “Swachh Bharat” and “Clean India” with his iconic circular specs becoming the official logo for the mission.