Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, an unapologetic critic of the Anna Hazare anticorruption campaign, suggested the 73-year old Gandhian was more of a puppet and less of a leader of the movement he came to symbolize.
Ms. Roy’s has been a rare voice of dissent at a time when Mr. Hazare’s hunger strike was rallying mass support across India, encouraging public figures ranging from opposition politicians to Bollywood stars to jump on the pro-Hazare bandwagon. Now that Mr. Hazare broke his fast after civil society activists and the government agreed on a broad legislative framework to set up an anticorruption ombudsman, or Lokpal, Ms. Roy once again lashed out against Team Anna.
In a Tuesday interview with television channel CNN-IBN, Ms. Roy accused them of having taken advantage of widespread popular anger against corruption to push through a very specific agenda: their own version of the Lokpal Bill, which she described as “regressive.”
“I think that the anger about corruption became so widespread and generalized” that nobody looked at the “dissonance between the specific legislation and the anger that was bringing people there,” she argued.
In this context, she described Mr. Hazare as little more than a prop of a movement that owed much of its popularity to an obliging media and to its dangerous use of patriotic symbolism.
“Certainly Anna Hazare was picked up and propped up as a sort of saint of the masses, but he wasn’t driving the movement, he wasn’t the brains behind the movement,” she said.
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