The country’s top defence manufacturer known for producing fighter jets and helicopters posted about something state of the art that was made in the backyard: a rickety wooden cabinet and a pointy aluminium chair from scrap.

Social media exploded into a chorus of jeers, roasting Hindustan Aeronautics Limited on X for the post.

I looked a little harder and found Hindustan Aeronautics was not alone. Union government offices across the country had sprung into action, posting the triumphant before-and-after photos of a cleaning mission, in response to a directive that had hit them.

Northern Railway posted photos of toilets getting scrubbed à la Harpic ad at the Dehradun railway station, the Botanical Survey of India in Coimbatore made some desk and plastic chairs vanish from their dusty office, the Income Tax office in Hyderabad further emptied an already empty office room.

The ordnance factory in Medak, Telangana went ballistic after the grass in their lawn. They didn’t forget the proof of kill: geotagged photos of grass being mowed with precise latitude and longitude of where the grass mower was located.

One post from the “Vehicle Factory” in Jabalpur boasted about some shrubs that had been eliminated: “AVNL VFJ on 09.10.2024 (Wednesday) conducted cleaning at Shaktiman Park Near Gate 6 covering 2000 sq ft & 10 persons involved.”

I requested my colleague and The Collective’s data journalist, Ayushi Kar, to pause a bit on the big investigation she has been at to help me scan the social media platform more methodically. 

This is what she found in a jiffy before she went back to her investigation (into things that the government doesn’t like to post about).

More than 1,000 handles of obscure government offices across the country have posted with the hashtag #SpecialCampaign4 since October 2. They have used a cloud of other similar hashtags to try and make their posts go viral. Remember when the government used to talk about civil society actors using ‘toolkits’ to run online campaigns. Quite like that. 

Around 85% of the posts by mostly obscure government handles were with images and the rest went a step further and uploaded videos. The posts are likely to be read by 623.5M other X handles. And, if X post reach earns brownie points in this government, then the Ministry of Railways will be someone’s favourite soon. 

But why blame the poor officials in these lakhs of offices for wasting their time snapping and posting photos of freshly cleaned office spaces when there is clearly someone running this as a concerted campaign from above?

So, who ordered the entire government machinery into a scrub mode? “We got orders from the top in Delhi,” said my source in a Madhya Pradesh regional government office amid the guffaw, which soon turned into LOL. He wouldn’t reveal more.

We all know Narendra Modi led BJP government’s penchant of turning regular government processes into a spectacle, to turn routine delivery of government services into something the citizens end up feeling thankful for. Friends of the government often say promotion is part and parcel of governance. Earlier governments did it by placing advertisements in newspapers and the current one uses the power of social media to do so wider, and cheaper. To my mind, there is truth to both ends.

So, who on top has so much time and can divert precious resources to generate a spectacle out of what should have been a routine everyday work?

I had presumed that a mid- or junior-level officer who was tasked some years back to annually send a letter to all government offices to do a clean-up around October 2, Gandhi Jayanti would have triggered the spectacle.

I poked a few friendly sources in Delhi to know who it was. So, the orders to lakhs of Union government offices across the country to engage in a social media frenzy came from none less than the most powerful officer of the Union government, the Cabinet Secretary, who reports directly to the Prime Minister. 

Yes, this is one of the myriad ways in which the cabinet secretary, the senior-most bureaucrat, handpicked by the Prime Minister to advise him and his government and execute government’s decisions, and reporting boss for RAW, spends his serious and busy life.

To be fair to him, he would have only signed off on a letter that was drafted by his office to create a social media spectacle. This would be followed up with a detailed order of what has to be done step-wise, day by day. The way governments work, officials under him would have created a file or two, drummed up several drafts that were then improved upon for bureaucratic English. A few meetings were surely held to hash out details. Finally, the polished directive was issued as an official office memorandum. Every possible ministry of the Union government followed it up with their more detailed instructions to the officials across the country under their administrative control. 

All these for a successful social media spectacle, and of course, some cleanliness drive.

 Special Campaign 4.0

Yes, that’s what it was called. The Union government ordered lakhs of offices to run the campaign with a hashtag “#Special Campaign 4.0”.

Technically, this was to be a ‘Swacchta and minimising pendency’ campaign. Cleanliness or Swacchta was to be one part, addressing all pending grievances of citizens, clearing up backlog of files and decisions that could materially impact lives of millions of citizens was the other. I think the latter holds the potential to be a game-changer in governance. But, not when it’s done as part of a spectacle.

We dug out the documents and orders from the top that eventually reached more than 4 lakh offices of the Union government. 

A full media campaign was put in place, with senior officers in Delhi overseeing operations. Each government office was asked  to coordinate with its internal media unit to develop a detailed plan for filming and photography. High-resolution photographs were to be taken before and after the campaign.

Daily, between October 2 and 31, lakhs of officials across these government agencies would have to click videos and photos, post them and upload them on a special portal created for the purpose. In Delhi, top officials will review these submissions ministry-wise. Then each of these offices will send a ‘self-assessment’ form to the Union government where a weekly review will lead to a final report that will be sent to the cabinet secretary and the Prime Minister’s Office.

The self-assessment form asks details such as how much scrap was sold and how much office area and sites were cleaned up. The number of cleaned-up sites had to match with the numbers uploaded daily with photographs.

And in November, there will be a ‘third-party evaluation’ of the campaign as well, where a consultant will tell the government how well it was done.

Hashtag Priorities

You could say this is a government that bothers about cleanliness. Why crib? I wonder, if the government has to run short campaigns, scripted and directed by the Prime Minister’s Office, to achieve basic everyday cleanliness, even after 10 years of the Swachh Bharat Campaign,  isn’t it proof of how over-centralised governance wastes human resources merely to create social media spectacle?

Why would you and I as citizens want our Prime Minister and cabinet secretary and thousands of other officials to spend their time closely monitoring before and after shots of clean-up drives by lakhs of government officials instead of giving us a bang for the buck we pay them?

The government knows well that there is the more valuable part of this campaign -- reducing ‘pendency’-- that really can’t be turned into hashtagged visuals. Reducing pendency is the bureaucratic language for doing what the government ought to have done months and years ago - respond to people’s grievances. We have to await the government’s promotional posts on X to know more about how the government scored on that count. Whether grievances did get addressed or not, will remain a mystery.

Be prepared for a deluge of #SpecialCampaign4 posts with images of ‘office with trash’ and ‘office without trash’ over the next few days from all over the country. You and I are paying for it.