Rajnath walks to drive ‘Swachh’ message home

LUCKNOW : Defence minister Rajnath Singh covered a distance of roughly two kilometres on foot, starting from the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Hazratganj and ending at the Maharana Pratap statue in Hussainganj to raise the issue of cleanliness in his Lucknow Lok Sabha constituency.

Carrying placards that read ‘healthy India, happy India’ and ‘clean India, contented India’, the party workers and commoners, who walked alongside him, kept raising slogans all along the route that the defence minister covered in under an hour.

Rajnath Singh also walked past the BJP headquarters, which was declared free of ‘single-use plastic’ on Wednesday.

The defence minister started his march by paying tribute to Mahatma Gandhi as well as former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose 115th birth anniversary coincided with Gandhi’s 150th.

“It was in Lucknow in 1917 where the Congress convention was held that Gandhiji was reminded how farmers in Champaran, Bihar, were being exploited. Hearing this, Gandhiji had visited Champaran. After listening to farmers there he had launched the civil disobedience movement, united the farmers and gave them the message of cleanliness too,” he said.

“On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had flagged the issue of cleanliness and urged the nation to make the country clean and shun the use of single-use plastic. The padyatras being undertaken by us now have been named Gandhi sankalp padyatras as a tribute to Gandhiji and to honour his vision of clean India,” Rajnath Singh said.

“If there is any government that could fulfil Gandhi’s dream of Swachh Bharat, it would be ours,” Rajnath Singh said while complimenting PM Modi for making cleanliness a people’s movement. His son Pankaj Singh, a lawmaker from Noida and general secretary of UP BJP, was among the leaders to participate in cleanliness campaign in Bhawani Ganj ward of the state capital where he was seen collecting garbage and depositing it in a waste bin.