With Assembly election approaching, the Congress party is seeking to turn the tables on AAP in Punjab by pointing to mounting garbage in several cities and asking: “Jhaadu kithe hai?” — where is the broom, the symbol of AAP, that was meant to sweep it all away.
As a garbage disposal crisis has gripped towns and cities across the state for the last few days, the opposition Congress is now using the ruling party’s symbol to mock the situation. The party kicked off its “Jhaadu kithe hai?” campaign from Sangrur, the home turf of Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
A theme song for the campaign, “Jhaadu kithe hai?”, is being widely circulated on digital platforms. It questions the ruling party on its promise of ‘badlav’ (change) as garbage lies strewn across every city and town. The song ends with the lines: “Saan Punjab di mitti vich ruldi ae” — “the reputation and dignity of Punjab is rolling in the dust”.
Through the digital campaign, the party is inviting citizens to witness the ground reality by sharing pictures of garbage strewn across streets.
The crisis has worsened due to a pen-down strike by safai karamcharis. The strike has crippled garbage collection and disposal in nearly 120 of the state’s 167 urban local bodies, as over 30,000 workers have gone on strike after the state government failed to fulfil its promise of regularising their services. Cities and towns in the Malwa, Doaba and Majha regions are already witnessing heaps of garbage piling up near markets, residential colonies, schools, hospitals and along roadsides.
Senior Congress leader and former Cabinet minister Vijay Inder Singla, who launched the campaign in Sangrur, said: “Files of filth, toxic medical waste, and a collapsing waste management system whose only solution for ‘cleanliness’ is burning the evidence! When a right as basic as a clean environment is stripped away, silence becomes complicity. We are highlighting the issue through this campaign anthem.”
The campaign is also being run by the party in other districts.
Jaskirat Singh from Public Action Committee (PAC), a group of environmentalists working on solid waste and sewage disposal, said: “During the 2022 Assembly election, ‘jhaadu’ — the official election symbol of the ruling AAP — was invoked to send a message of sweeping out political corruption and literally cleaning up governance and civic infrastructure. If the party belongs to the broom, where is the broom when our streets are filthy?”
Local Government Minister Harjot Bains, when reached, said not all safai karamcharis were on strike. "I will myself ensure that the garbage collection and disposal system is in place,” he said.
On the Congress’s ‘Jhaadu kithe hai’ campaign, he said people would give a reply to the Congress in the next Assembly election.