The many sides of Anna Hazare

Anna Hazare's desire to embrace Gandhi's legacy may be sincere,
but is also calculated, observers say. It has also paid dividends
 by tapping into a national yearning for an inspirational leader.

A year ago, the name of Anna Hazare was known mainly to rural activists. A few months ago, he catapulted to national attention by going on a public fast at Jantar Mantar, Delhi's equivalent of Speakers' Corner. Crowds gathered, politicians were ritually denounced and assorted movie stars joined him on the dais. Today, the 74-year-old is at the centre of one of the biggest protests in decades, uniting millions of Indians, including its growing middle class, against a Congress Party-led government beset by corruption scandals in its second term.

But while India's "new Gandhi" is widely admired for his campaign, there are growing concerns over his authoritarian style, nationalist overtones and use of violence to effect change - all far removed from Gandhi's methods.

Hazare's transformation of Ralegan Siddhi from a barren landscape tilled by poor farmers blighted by illiteracy and alcoholism to a model village won international plaudits and a Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest award. His work has been recognized by the World Bank.

He started work on improving his village following an epiphany as a low-ranking soldier in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war - he was the sole survivor of a Pakistani assault.

Hazare established a series of projects to conserve water, stockpile grain, develop new dairies, plant trees and build schools and training institutes. He introduced social reforms to end caste divisions and ended a ban on "untouchables" from worshipping at the village temple and drawing water from the upper caste well. He built a successful secondary school from where four "untouchable" children have gone on to university and qualified as doctors. Literacy rates rose from 15 per cent in the mid-1970s to 100 per cent today.

But according to senior aides in his charitable trust and the village assembly his revolution was based on a strict code of behaviour and harsh and violent punishments against those who broke it.

The code bans the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, compels "voluntary" labour on community projects and forbids families from having more than two children.

Several senior disciples of Hazare said the ban on alcohol and the use of violence to achieve it was central to the village's transformation. Thakaram Raut, a retired teacher and trustee of Anna Hazare's Hind Swaraj Trust, said his leader used a gang of youths to destroy the distilleries of those who ignored his order for them to close.

"Drunkards" who broke the ban on alcohol were brought to the village square, tied to a pole covered with barbed wire and personally whipped by Hazare with his canvas army belt.

He told aides only he could administer the beatings because only those who, like him, had served the people "like a mother" had the right to punish them. Those thrashed by Hazare eventually came to worship him, said Raut.

The village head or Sarpanch, Jaisil Mahapari, said that despite Hazare's use of violence, he and Mahatma Gandhi shared a similar lifestyle and philosophy.

"His lifestyle is very simple. Mahatma Gandhi was great in his land and Anna Hazare is great in his place. This village was known as a drunken village and now today it is drinkfree. He loves the villagers as his own children and punishes them to create obedient children," he said.

"People are afraid of him but this is respect."

If the effort to embrace Gandhi's legacy is sincere, it is also conscious and calculated, and observers say it has paid dividends by tapping into a national yearning for an inspirational leader.

"Hazare has clearly appropriated symbols connected with Gandhi, from sitting on a stage with Gandhi's picture behind him to using terms like 'civil disobedience' which most Indians associate with Gandhi," said Yamini Aiyar, senior fellow at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research think-tank.

"It's helped him capture the public's attention, since Gandhi still commands the popular imagination in this country."

But where Gandhi's hunger strikes against British colonial rule are still seen as models of principled self-sacrifice, Hazare's fast for stronger anti-corruption laws strikes some as belligerent to the point of arrogance.

Rajiv Vora, chairman of the Delhi-based Global Gandhian Movement for Swaraj (selfrule) said Hazare's inflexible approach to negotiations with the government was "not Gandhian at all."

He also took strong exception to the activist's widely publicized calls for officials convicted of serious fraud to be hanged.

"Gandhi would never have spoken like that, he would never have used threats," Vora said.

And Gandhi's great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, denounced what he saw as "a very Machiavellian strategy" to use emotive, independence-era images and sound bites to pull on public heartstrings.

"The attempt to take over the space left behind by Gandhi reveals the dishonesty of the whole movement," he said.

"It's a sham, they are basically trying to pull a fast one on the nation."

For Mani Shankar Aiyar, a veteran Congress party politician, the campaign has been stagemanaged in a fashion that betrays the integrity of the historic events it seeks to emulate.

"Inside a democracy ... to say I don't care a damn for your institutions, your procedures, and I am going to launch a second freedom struggle and start imitating Ben Kingsley in the Gandhi film, I think you are reducing what was the first really noble freedom struggle into a farce," Aiyar said.