Hazare an unlikely hero

Veteran Indian social activist Anna Hazare gestures from a car after being
 detained by police in New Delhi Aug. 16, 2011. Hazare was arrested
by police on Tuesday to prevent him from launching a fast
 to the death to force the government to pass tougher
 anti-corruption laws.

NEW DELHI—Anna Hazare makes an unlikely hero in India. He is a 74-year-old bachelor who has made a career out of standing up to injustice and corruption, a campaign that ties him to one of the nation’s most revered leaders, Mahatma Gandhi.

Dressed in the signature white cap of his native Maharashtra state on the west coast of India, Hazare makes a stately figure, his crisp white clothes representing his calls for transparency while referencing Gandhi. His protest tactics from the Gandhian school of civil disobedience have reached into the consciousness of thousands, most of them youth.

Seated before a growing crowd at Jantar Mantar, the country’s protest headquarters in New Delhi, Hazare managed to pull off a significant coup: he pushed a faltering Indian government into a tight corner by first going on a hunger strike, then refusing to leave Tihar Jail, one of the country’s most notorious prisons, despite being freed by the government.

It’s a theatrical spectacle but one that has lured people across India who have become increasingly frustrated by the country’s lethargic, bloated and deeply corrupt structures.

Hazare and his followers are fighting to pass the long-delayed Jan Lokpal bill, first proposed in 1969, which would install an independent anti-corruption ombudsman.

“Think of Anna Hazare, Mr. Prime Minister,” wrote Shiv Visvanathan, a prominent Indian sociologist, in an open letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the website of an Indian news channel. “He is another mild man like you and today he stands for the ideals the Congress (Singh’s party) has forgotten. Let me list them: the dreams of honesty and idealism, the diligence that politics demands, and the intelligence that morality requires.”

But this Hazare wasn’t born to fight the system. Kisan Baburao Hazare was the eldest of seven children born to a labourer father and a homemaker mother in a small village in today’s Maharashtra state. The family later moved to Ralegan Siddhi, their ancestral village. Hazare achieved a seventh-grade education.

Hazare enlisted in the Indian army as a driver during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. He was driving a truck full of soldiers when two Pakistani jets attacked his platoon. Everyone died save Hazare, who was left to ponder why God had let him live.

He decided then that he was ready to sacrifice worldly pleasures for the betterment of his fellow Indians and started grassroots-level work by cleaning up his village. He launched an anti-alcohol campaign to combat the growing liquor intake in the village. That caused a dramatic drop in crime. He also developed a strong watershed program to teach villagers how to store rainwater and to raise the area’s quickly diminishing water table.

His efforts to transform Ralegan Siddhi from a dirt-poor village into an economically sustainable and efficient community earned Hazare the Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest honour.

Uplifting Ralegan Siddhi was just the beginning for Hazare. He has been a staunch agitator against corruption and has a zero-tolerance rule.

That’s made him a thorn in the side of the ruling Congress government, which has a long history of corruption scandals. Most recently, there were accusations that up to $1.8 billion was misappropriated from the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Meanwhile, poverty remains a huge problem in India. Statistics show 46 per cent of children are malnourished. Four to five million don’t have access to water.

For Hazare, who has spent the past 45 years trying to address the daily burdens of India’s common people, these figures are unacceptable. Apparently plenty of young people agree.