By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has praised Congress MP Shashi Tharoor for accepting his invitation to join the cleanliness drive.
However a Congress leader in Kerala described the MP as “immature.”
“A great effort by @ShashiTharoor! His active participation in Swachh Bharat Mission is very encouraging,” the prime minister wrote on Twitter appreciating the cleanliness drive Tharoor initiated in the Kerala capital which he represents for the second term as an MP.
Tharoor was among nine celebrities Modi invited to join him in the Clean India campaign launched on October 2, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
The prime minister also retweeted, from his personal account @narendramodi, images of the former UN diplomat cleaning up the beaches of Vizhinjam fishing hamlet on Saturday.
Tharoor was sacked as an official spokesman of the party for his alleged “Modi adulation” early this month.
Yesterday, he thanked Modi and sought his support for a canal cleaning project that he announced for his constituency during the cleaning drive.
He also posted images of the beach before and after his intervention and a video explaining his mission for the city and thanking the prime minister for “rebaptising” and bringing the previous Congress governments’ programme to the forefront of national consciousness.
In the five-minute video, Tharoor sought federal assistance for the revival of Parvathy Puthanar, a historic man-made canal flowing through the heart of the city which once formed its key mode of transportation, and making it navigable.
“Thank you @narendramodi ji. Here’s a video of my clean-up & a request to you (also coming by letter). https://t.co/pFKvN9IpKS,” he tweeted. “Let’s all work together to keep our India clean,” he added in the video message.
Tharoor repeated his stand that Mahatma Gandhi’s sanitation drive was a national cause and not aligned to any party. “To my mind, there’s no political significance to this event. I don’t see it as a political activity. Rather, for me, it’s part of a national mission,” he said.
He has also asserted that he was a Congressman and his ideology was that there should be clean surroundings. It was Mahatma Gandhi who said sanitation was more important than independence.
Meanwhile, K Muraleedharan, a Kerala legislator and a former chief of the Congress Party in the state, criticised Tharoor saying his actions lacked “political maturity.”
“He shouldn’t have waited for Modi to clean up his constituency. He could have done it much before, at least after he remitted office as a minister or when the state government launched a similar mission,” Muraleedharan said.
Meanwhile, Tharoor’s predecessor A Charles, 83, died yesterday.
Charles who represented the Kerala capital for three terms since 1984, died in a hospital after a prolonged illness.
Charles was elected to Lok Sabha for successive terms in 1984, 1989 and 1991 and he was the only MP to be re-elected from here before Tharoor.
Charles was handpicked by the late chief minister K Karunakaran to contest against Neelalohithadasan Nadar, who belonged to the influential backward Nadar community in the constituency.
His winning streak was stopped by Communist veteran K V Surendranath in 1996.
He signed the nomination for Tharoor in the last elections and his strong backing also helped him to retain his sway over the voters in the community’s strongholds against the Left’s church-backed candidate Dr Bennet Abraham and BJP strongman O Rajagopal.
Tharoor last visited him immediately after his cleaning drive on Saturday and tweeted his visit later.
“Saddened by news that A Charles, the only other Tvm MP to have been re-elected, passed away minutes after my tweet. May his noble soul RIP,” he wrote.
Tharoor offers sweet to Charles after winning parliamentary polls in May. Charles died yesterday aged 83.
