Anna Hazare Ends Fast (1)

Kisan Baburao(Anna) Hazare, 74, comes from a village in Maharashtra State, Western India. He went to school for only seven years. For years he served the Indian Army as a driver. After coming back to his village, he worked a lot for its improvement by prohibition, irrigation, introduction of new crops, increasing milk production, spreading education, curtailing social cost of marriages and so on.
He is almost landless and gets his pension from the Indian Army. As a social activist he contributed to the enacting of the State Right to Information Act, which became a base for the national act of the same name in 2005. I had the pleasure of meeting him once, when the Indian Society of Gandhian Studies met at another place in his State in 2007.
Anna Hazare as a social activist led a Lokpal(Ombudsman) movement, demanding the setting up of a strong Lokpal both at the Centre and the States(to be called Lokayuktas) to fight corruption widely permeated in the Indian society. He fasted in this connection in April 2011, his 12th, many of which were against corruption.
The Government of India made its own Lokpal Bill in July, but it did not satisfy some of Anna's crucial points, leading his second fast demanding his more strict Jan Lokpal(People's Ombudsman) Bill to be passed by the Parliament. It suddenly created an atmosphere of a peaceful revolution all over the country, especially in big cities, for the first time after independence, for about two weeks, with hundreds of thousands of people gathering and marching together.
We must consider the meaning of corruption. The innumerable number of people who gathered had got grievances some way or another against the bureaucracy. Passport Office, traffic police, water and electricity bills, admission to schools etc., birth and death certificates(really?). Those offices all wanted bribery, people said. I have my own small experience. When I crossed from one State to another by a taxi a few years ago, after I paid the legitimate tax at the border, I saw my driver approaching the policeman and paid him Rs.20. I asked him what would happen if he did not pay the money. The answer was that we would have been detained there for one hour. He further told me of his having to pay huge sum of money if he tries to get a job, a lower one, in the government offices.
Those gathered could be broadly called the middle class people, the ordinary citizens, not ones fetched from the villages for political mobilization, and not one or two but almost everybody has got such a story of paying bribery to tell, or too common to tell. In the early evenings in the weekend they were marching hand in hand, strangers to each other, just like a human chain, something unheard-of in this country. Today's urban aam admi maybe a bit different from seven years ago when it was first said by the Prime Minister. The anti-corruption is thus a demand for a just distribution in the society.
The movement was compared to the "Quit India" of 1942. Slogans like "Corruption, quit India" have appeared. Some called it "the Second Freedom Struggle". Anna Hazare repeated, like Gandhi then, "Karenge ya Marenge(Do or die)". He further said that this government is looting the country. Strong words. But it is a great credit to Anna and his 'Team Anna', and to the people at large, that it has been non-violent throughout. In this it is not comparable to the JP Movement of 1970s, which not only led to much destruction but also was snatched away by the Hindu communal forces.(to be concluded)