For the past few months one small and unassuming man has been making a lot of noise all over my country, India. His name is Kisan Baburao Hazare, and he is usually known as Anna. He has a reason to make his presence felt and has much of this nation – educated and not, rich and poor, urban and rural – on his side, rooting for him.
The social activist is best known for his fight against corruption and, while his methods may be questionable, his goals are indeed noble, a cause worth doing battle for. And while a lot of my friends and others I know may support him and his way of getting heard, I certainly do not. But then, for now at least, he is a hero and all of us needs one of those every now and then, I know.
Hazare was born June 15, 1937, and does his work from a village in my home state of Maharashtra called Ralegaon Siddhi, a place he has been credited with helping to develop and structure into what is today known as a model township. As part of a family that was not very well off or highly educated, he was brought to the city by his aunt, who brought him up, educating him till the 7th grade. To bring some money into the family, he started working after that, selling flowers in central Mumbai. He prospered and brought two of his brothers to the city to work.
It is perhaps the next stage of his life that taught him much about strategy and battle – in 1962 the 25-year-old Hazare joined the army as a driver, posted near the Pakistan border at the Khem Karan sector. In an air attack on Indian bases in 1865, Hazare narrowly escaped death, but his comrades were all killed – this started him thinking about the purpose and meaning of life and death and set him on the path of reform and service of the less advantaged. A road accident in the mid-70s was the true turning point – that decided Hazare’s future; he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of humanity. He was 38.
Hazare retired from the army in 1978. Much of his work centred around the small village of Ralegaon Siddhi, where he worked on development and in fighting alcoholism. In that battle, he was unstintingly harsh. Hazare himself flogged drunk villagers and justified his actions: “Rural India is a harsh society. Doesn’t a mother administer bitter medicines to a sick child when she knows that the medicine can cure her child? The child may not like the medicine, but the mother does it only because she cares for the child. The alcoholics were punished so that their families would not be destroyed.” And the tough love seemed to pay off; he became the crusader, the saviour, the hero.
Soon Hazare’s work and its ambit had stretched to cover more than just one village and more than the issues he was already known for. He battled politicians and industry alike, laying the foundation for the Right to Information Act, among other milestones. This time, over the past few months, his aim is to wipe out a national ailment: corruption. He has proposed to the Indian government the Jan Lokpal Bill, a law to establish an ombudsman, or Lokpal, who has the power to deal with the problem of corruption in public office – from the prime minister to a less exalted minion in the corridors of government.
On April 5 this year, he decided to begin a fast unto death at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push the Indian government into taking action on a strong anti-corruption act. The fast ended four days later, when the government agreed to his demands, hoping to get him out of the spotlight, but Hazare’s name had already become a buzzword all over the country.
For so many reasons, the little man from a little village is now a national figure, respected, almost revered, by luminaries like social activists Medha Patkar and Arvind Kejriwal, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, spiritual leaders Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev and Swami Agnivesh, former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, along with countless less well-known people nation-wide. The protests continue, every now and then flaring up into mass rallies and marches, as Anna Hazare and his team find new issues to object to – the arrest of Baba Ramdev, the draft of the Lokpal Bill, something a government official said, a new sugar factory, an obscure point in the draft being considered for approval…anything that could even remotely be contentious becomes so.
Along the way, there is a lot that I cannot understand. If – as so many people call him – this ‘new Gandhi’ is really on the side of progress, why is he stopping a city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, working with his rallies and protest marches? Does he realise that one day off work can mean the difference between starvation and a meal for some of the urban poor? Why are so many people, some extremely well qualified, highly educated, reputed as thinkers, see him as such a significant presence today? Are they all – are we all – so tired of the way India survives with corruption as an everyday- every moment companion to accomplishment of anything from getting a ration card to gaining admission into primary school? We are. I am.
But do I believe in Anna Hazare as the solution to all the problems faced by a modern, progressive and developing nation? No, I don’t. I would, frankly, stop all these marches, rallies, protests and find a way to keep myself free from any taint of corruption first, be it paying a cop for a traffic offence or accepting a favour for writing a story published in a newspaper. It starts with me. As an individual, I can make a difference, quietly, effectively, without having to make any noise about it, without playing a tangled game of politics in doing it, without confrontation and hordes of unwashed people gathering in a public space and creating chaos and disrupting life. To me, for me, that is where the battle can really be won: in me, with me, by me.
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