A Matter Out of Place

Why dirt and waste are two parallel realms which need to be linked up in Modi’s project on cleaning up India

Cleanliness summons the cliché in India. Its claims to being next to Godliness is far-fetched. In fact, cleanliness is a private virtue, a housewife’s entitlement. Public spaces signal the end of cleanliness. It is a place where India dumps its garbage and pretends to be virtuous. Sociologists can never explain why public spaces are used as dumping yards. They only know that ‘public’ and ‘garbage’ are synonymous. So when Narendra Modi started a campaign for cleanliness, I got nostalgic and began looking for precedents.

One remembers that the late Rajiv Gandhi used to be called Mr Clean. Partly it was because he entered politics with an unsullied reputation; but Mr Clean and his career are forgotten footnotes. Decades later, the Aam Aadmi Party followed, immortalising the broom as the dirty city’s doom. The magic worked for a while, but the broom as a political symbol is today a tired one, dulled to the promise of reminding the party to clean itself.

Narendra Modi’s politics of cleanliness is more carefully crafted. It presents cleanliness as a part of a package of civic virtues, the prelude to governance, arguing that efficiency, cleanliness and punctuality go together. One realises the shrewdness of the move. It is not naïve as AAP’s battle against corruption was. It is a move for cleanliness. Cleanliness is about hygiene; corruption demands a deeper moral and political change. The symbolic moves are subtle. Modi presents it as a grateful nation’s gift to Gandhi. In fact, Gandhi’s spectacles in a fluid outline symbolise the mnemonics of the programme. Not to be left behind, Amul has a delightful cartoon of the utterly butterly girl and a benign Modi holding brooms. Modi appears like a benign uncle, an absent-minded academic being asked to clean up for the first time. There is a sense of invented innocence here because the term ‘clean up’ invokes encounters, the idea of murder as hygiene. Even arm chair readers are more inclined to remember Alfred Hitchcock’s book Clean Crimes and Neat Murders, when the idea of cleanliness is invoked. In every office, home, school and city. The Indian diaspora almost treated it as the beginning of a new era when the regime of sanitation was inaugurated by Modi. One wishes there was benign RK Laxman cartoon with the Common Man wondering about what is going on. Project Clean Up without cartoons seems a bleak beginning. But there is no doubt that there is something official about it.

The first signs of officialdom being asked to clean up were the much publicised raids on government offices. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Law, visited Delhi’s Gol Dak Khana, a post office, and found files wearing the traditional uniform of dust. He ran his finger across a desk and uncovered archaeological layers of dirt while a postal department employee looked on fatalistically. Dirt was the karma of the lower bureaucracy and to remove dirt almost seemed an act of sacrilege.

The English anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her classic little book, Purity and Danger, described dirt as matter out of place. I do not know whether the Prime Minister has read it, but he could make it the Green Book of his regime. The war against dirt would be more historic and more rhetorical than the war against poverty, epidemics, Naxalites and other alien viruses. Modi and his regime seem to think that the civics of cleanliness must accompany any act of governance. One can imagine the New Year books of governance giving brownie points for governance and Indian states getting a new order of ranking with sanitation as highest priority. There is a touch of naiveté, even science fiction, in this war on dirt. It appears like a Boy Scout fancy being blown up to Stalinist proportions. Yet Modi has caught the imagination of middle-class India, which seems convinced that a swachh India is the beginning of a swadesi India. One envies the enthusiasm, vigour and commitment of the man. Driving today near Mandi House, I saw a wall being cleaned up, as a broom and sprays of water removed layers of imperious poster paper. It was as if dirt and memory went together.

There are parts of the project citizens respond to almost immediately. One project that appeals in an almost primordial sense is the promise to clean up the Ganges. The Ganges immediately summons the cosmos, the civics of life. Cleaning up the river is a masterstroke of ecology. One needs new ideas in technology, new rituals of cleanliness to sustain the project. Yet one often sees a standard cliché of a bit of Hinduism combining with a bit of technology as Uma Bharati threatens to link up India’s rivers, an act of sacrilege for which the future may never forgive her.

There is a token of official ritual about many of these programmes. When Modi inaugurated the Swachh Bharat programme on 2 October, Gandhi’s birth anniversary, one had the sight of ministers sweeping office corridors and gardens. Unfortunately, for once Congress workers were unbelievably vigilant and captured pictures of employees picking up garbage and ‘littering it artfully’ so the ministers could enact their ritual duties. In fact, 2 October was not a holiday for municipal employees who had to report to clean up India. Yet, for all the hypocrisy, tokenism and cynicism, one wants India to be sparkling clean. Imagine railway bathrooms sparkling clean and smelling of antiseptic fluid. Cleanliness demands faith and even the most wretched devotee of dirt, the ‘Pig-Pen’ that Charles Schulz immortalised, might like a clean India. Only the inviting touch of the unbelievable will make the everydayness of this project come true.

During his Independence Day speech, Modi promised a clean toilet in every school. Here he touched a deep chord because many a girl child had to drop out of school because of the unavailability of usable toilets. Modi, in fact, proposed this as a CSR project. One has no real objection, but one hopes the public and corporations do not remain short term in perspective. The tragedy is that the projects inaugurated with pomp one day gather dust, dirt and disgust a few months later.

Modi’s project does strike a responsive chord in every Indian citizen. Our piles of dirt often become cities of their own, demanding their own folklore.

The point I wish to make is that dirt and waste have to be linked creatively. Dirt has to be cleaned, but waste has to be creatively utilised. Dirt summons the virus, the germ, the epidemic, but waste summons the citizenship of the scavenger, the kabadiwaala who recycle materials, adding new life to them. Dirt and waste are two parallel realms which need to be linked up in Modi’s project on cleaning up India. I think there is food for thought here because there is deeper challenge to Modi’s catechism of cleanliness.

Modi’s policy diktats have been critical of NREGA and have said little about the informal economy. Governance, I believe, cannot be about official cleanups. Dusting files and municipal offices is a welcome act, but what one needs is a statement on the other side of dirt, the informal and biomass economy, the role of livelihoods built around waste. Modi, as a wag put it, “cannot throw the bathwater of waste in cleaning up the baby of dirt”. This would be the greatest failure of his office because as the scientist CV Seshadri put it ‘waste, is the only resource of our wasted people’. To confuse it with dirt would be democratically disastrous.

At another level, governance needs new rituals, everyday acts of drama the media can report. Operation dirt is a ritual drama. One hopes however that it is more reflective of what cleaning up means in India. Cleanups, as another wag put it, is a dirty, ambiguous business. This, Modi needs to understand as the capital begins to sparkle under the new civics of soap. Governance occasionally does signal a feel-good feeling.

Cleaning upepidemicNarendra Modi