Caught & Bowled: Inaccurate claims are not the way to respect Ram Manohar Lohia's legacy

Mr. Kumar's statement was a potshot at the NDA government's Swachh Bharat campaign and an attempt to show there were leaders before Narendra Modi who cared about cleanliness. But was Ram Manohar Lohia the first?

Now if you've noticed the logo for the Swachh Bharat campaign, it's Mahatma Gandhi's spectacles and with good reason. It isn't just an attempt to mine the Gandhi legacy but was done in recognition of the fact that Gandhiji campaigned actively about cleanliness.

For example, in 1917, Gandhiji was involved in a movement in Champaran in Mr. Kumar's own state of Bihar where, among other things, he and his followers worked to get rid of the unsanitary conditions people were living in by cleaning up streets, ponds and wells. Mind you, this was in 1917 when Lohia would have been only seven years old!

This is not to diminish Lohia's own work, which involved an agitation to clean up the Ganga river way back in the 1950s. But if you want to respect Lohia and his legacy, making historically inaccurate claims to score political points isn't the way to go about it.