India, Oct. 7 -- A friend and school principal told me a little proudly that on the Gandhi Jayanti Day on October 2, she organised a cleanliness drive on the school campus in which teachers, students and other staff took part. On the same day, a bishop in New Delhi went to a nearby Hanuman temple in Delhi with a broom to sweep the floor. It is a different matter that the floor happened to be carpeted and was in a spick and span condition. I wish he had used a vacuum cleaner!
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a broom to initiate his cleanliness drive a few years ago, his associates had managed to pluck some green leaves and put them on the floor so that he could sweep the much-cleaned road off the new leaves. When I saw the photograph,...