Can This Sociologist Get Away With Naming An Indian Village After Trump?

Sulabh International (NGO) founder Bindeshwar Pathak announced earlier this June that he planned to name a village that’s being developed in the Mewat region of Rajasthan after Donald Trump. The problem, well blessing, is that he’s a sociologist, not a Government official. It still took the Indian Government three days to announce Pathak did not have the power to take such a decision, while media outlets had a feeding frenzy with the headline.

In the suburbs of Washington DC, he said, “I announce to name one village in India as Trump Village.” According to Mr. Pathak, he made this announcement with the hopes of furthering India-US ties. The hilarious part of the story lies in the fact that Mr. Pathak was in the suburbs of DC urging the Indian-American community to help realise the goal of sanitation and cleanliness in India. How can a man who was named brand ambassador for the Swachh Railways Mission in 2016 and whose NGO has been granted consultative status by the UN Economic and Social Council think that Trump has any inkling of respect for the environment. It’s like asking Michael Jackson to look after children!

Any sane person, no matter how much they adore Trump, cannot deny that he does not care about the environment:

I. His administration’s budget proposal would cut the EPA by almost a third — more than any other agency. He wants to cut a quarter of the workforce and abolish 56 programs with impacts from the Chesapeake Bay to Puget Sound.

II. The Lautenberg Act, a new chemical safety law, was finally passed last year to put a stop to previously reckless chemical safety law that had been in place for decades. However, Trump appointed Nancy Beck to write the rules for this law, even though she lobbied against the change as an employee of the main chemical industry trade association.

III. Scott Pruitt, the man who has pretty much made it his mission to battle the EPA, is now running it. It’s like you spend years being a murderer and then one day the president strolls in and says, “Son, I’d like to appoint you as a Police Chief.” Pruitt’s second-in-command demands the closure of a rule that limits Mercury pollution. What fresh hell is this!

IV. Trump is also planning to take away the Clean Power Plan, America’s first attempt to limit carbon pollution from power plants.

V. If you needed a fifth one, he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. The only other country left with the US on this stand is Syria, but that’s pretty understandable to an extent considering they’re currently a war-torn nation (Nicaragua rejected the Climate Accord because it didn’t go far enough). Even North Korea signed the agreement, who would have thought that Kim Jong-un would have more sense than a US president.

And it gets worse. After Pathak made the announcement, he began to extol the virtues of his NGO’s toilet technology to US government representatives, like Virginia Republican Puneet Ahluwalia. We don’t know how many toilets he sold, but we do know that the majority of what came out of Pathak’s mouth belonged inside a toilet. At the time when the news broke, it seems only one news outlet, that we know of, put forth the question that needed to be asked – The Wire – writing, “None of that quite explains why Pathak thinks he can rename villages. A toilet, probably – but a village?”