Politicians must learn to rein in urge for self-promotion

A woman gets a Covid-19 vaccine shot at Nair hospital. File pic

Mumbai Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal has directed civic officials to remove political banners and hoardings from vaccination centres. The BMC had received complaints about this material with claims about somebody or the other instrumental in making this facility available, so on and so forth.

This newspaper had earlier shone the spotlight on the one-upmanship among political leaders about the vaccination centres. The vaccine may be politicised at the national and international level, vaccination centres are being politicised at a local level with representatives smarting at being left out of openings, fighting about who should take credit for a facility.

Never short of and extremely quick when it comes to self-promotion measures, we now have pat-oneself -on-the-back posters which must be quite rightly removed. Instead let these leaders put up informative material like avenues to register for vaccinations, scientifically proven benefits of the vaccine, the importance of disbelieving superstition and venerating science. There can also be several dos and don'ts about post-vaccination measures, numbers to contact and how to spread the vaccine word to others, too.

All this will be much more beneficial to those arriving for the jab, rather than photographs of our netas and the so-called service they are doing for the people.
It is amusing to see the speed and efficiency at which such banners are made and arranged and then, put up at centres. One wonders why we do not see the same turbo-charged approach when it comes to solving local problems, even prosaic ones like clearing mounds of garbage or repairing broken footpaths. No wonder a local politician who had a penchant for putting up such hoardings in his area claiming credit for some works, had earned the unflattering epithet banner-ji.