India Today Newsmaker 2011: Anna Hazare

Anna Hazare Hope is a repudiation of today's desperation and a celebration of tomorrow's opportunities. Hope is the father of change. It shapes the dreams of the disillusioned. It is the power of the betrayed. In the histories of national freedom, it is hope that fuels dissent, and mobilises the voiceless against the lies of the state. In India 2011, hope wore a Gandhi topi. It fasted, dared the stormtroopers of a paranoid state, went to jail, awakened the middle class from its cozy stupor, brought the young and the idealistic to the mean streets of politics, and shook the foundations of a corrupt regime that kept changing its fig leaf in its anxiety to curtain shame. Hope became Anna Hazare in the year India's scandals boiled over into popular rage.This portly satyagrahi from the Maharashtrian village of Ralegan Siddhi walked into the consciousness of India at a time when the country was on the verge of abandoning hope and taking refuge in fatal stoicism. Between the dubious multi-crore 2G spectrum deal and the scandalous preparations for the Commonwealth Games, the overwhelming banality of corruption became the defining character of the UPA Government. A few went to jail, but India recognised them for what they had become: scapegoats. The highest echelon of the regime remained immune to accountability. As the stench pervaded the nation, Hazare thrust himself to the centrestage as Citizen Outraged. He led the uprising against the citadel on Raisina Hill as Citizen Rearmed.A boy offers sweets to a portrait of Anna Hazare in Ahmedabad.The discredited Government thought arrogance was an adequate response to dissent. India, the world's most volatile democracy, also has the most evolved civil society in Asia, and it has been consistently unforgiving to rulers swayed by totalitarian temptations. Parliament is the highest shrine of a civil society and Hazare, as a pilgrim let down by the gods of democracy, took his war to the sanctum sanctorum. His argument was moral, his method was Gandhian, though, as he repeatedly accepted, he was no Mahatma. He wanted Parliament to legislate an honest mechanism which incorporated the popular will to fight the cancer of corruption. The government resisted the intrusion of the outsider-for a while and at a heavy cost.The sweep and scope of a Jan Lokpal, a people's ombudsman, as envisaged by Hazare and his comrades in India Against Corruption (IAC) was a nightmare for the UPA. The Government has enough reason to shield the corrupt rather than punish them: the guilty are from its fold. A war against corruption meant a war on the regime itself; so, obviously, the Government opened hostilities against the inconvenient messenger. But Hazare under attack spawned a multitude of Hazares across the country, in towns and villages, spanning gender, class and age. When the street embraced the romance of 'we-are-all-Anna-Hazare-today', Delhi trembled, the fig leaves fell, and a triangulating regime lost the argument. Anna's movement did not defy Parliament; it sought to enlarge and empower institutions to curb corruption. Indians were inspired by a 74-year-old man, a former driver in the Indian Army. The fierceness of his commitment was only matched by his perseverance.Click here to EnlargeEven when faced with a volcanic street, the Government seems more interested in containing Hazare than curbing corruption. The draft Lokpal Bill, put together by the UPA's wily legal brains (Kapil Sibal, P. Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid), is a partial submission, full of deviations that could weaken its ability. A wider section of the lower bureaucracy will come under the Lokpal but the central investigating agency, the CBI, will continue to be the handmaiden of the Government. This is a rebuff to Hazare, who wants the agency under the control of the Lokpal. The principal Opposition party, BJP, wants CBI to be autonomous. Even though the Prime Minister is included in the ambit, enough escape routes have been left open in the name of national security. Even in this moment of seeming surrender, honour is not a virtue visible in South Block. If Hazare is an open book, the UPA Government is a secret text about survival.Anna Hazare with a young fan Hazare's response is in character: to up the ante. When INDIA TODAY caught up with him on a wintry evening in Delhi's Maharashtra Sadan, the only sign of change was the choice of his cap: the trademark white cotton Gandhi topi was replaced by a blue woollen one. Anna could take on the frozen conscience of the ruling establishment, but the December chill of Delhi was a bit too much. Still, the feisty tormentor of a beleaguered UPA wouldn't give in to the vagaries of weather: "Look at me, do I look ill?" Indeed, there was no heater in his room, though there were two in the visitor's room, full of volunteers and sundry worshippers of the saint who shook the state. In the course of the interview, he played down his own legend. "Mujhe Gandhi ke saath mat jodo (Don't make me a Gandhi)," he said (see interview). It was Vivekananda who taught him that "inner happiness comes from duty".Anna Hazare (centre) with his team at a press conference in New Delhi.Gandhi was a later influence. He deployed the Gandhian weapon of satyagraha against the power of a crooked state. He set the power of hunger against the hunger for power. In many ways, his moral system, conditioned by the discipline of the barrack and wisdom of the countryside, is in some conflict with the aspirations and attitudes of the metropolitan youth who have become his fan club. In time, the contradictions will emerge. In rural Ralegan, the Hazare country, he has declared war on vices such as drinking.There is a frightening simplicity-and clarity-about Hazare's idea of a perfect state with a few lofty men as arbiters. The moral dictatorship of the wisest has no patience for debate or consensus. The so-called Team Anna, a group of self-righteous Sancho Panzas, are not exactly the ideal ambassadors of a civil society; the power of protest and primetime exposure has already given them a false sense of invincibility. Hazare is the mascot; they provide the script that sustains the aura.Click here to EnlargeWhat makes their text of redemption, personified by the Gandhian, acceptable to the hopeless majority that lives outside Lutyens' Delhi is the political context. In a year that witnessed the serial blasts of reputations, Anna alone stood tall as the inspiration for a new iconography of heroism. Sonia Gandhi took the lead in the war against Hazare, bringing out her heaviest firepower. Courtiers of 10 Janpath were mobilised to sabotage Hazare's movement. It would be their Bill or nothing else. While the much eulogised moderniser-prime minister turned out to be a shade too tolerant of colleagues, Hazare soared above the sleaze of Delhi. When the ventriloquism of Manmohan Singh failed to restore faith in the ruling class, the folksy gospel of Hazare swayed the mind of India.When the smarmy interlocutors of the Government tried their lawyerly arguments, Hazare, with the purity of his purpose and the integrity of his character, won India. Hazare brought streetfighter chic back to politics. His combatant was worthy of his wrath: a Government, frightened but vengeful, that would go a long way to silence the man who shattered its comfort zone. The midnight knocks on the door of his apartment or a stint in Tihar Jail did not silence Hazare. They only added to the legend of the rebel.As the year of infamy draws to a close, the rage of Hazare has already changed the politics of India-and enlarged the idealism of a generation. He frightened the political class, and thereby reduced the distance between ruler and ruled. Hazare shifted the centre of political gravity: the prime minister is now in office, not in power. Hazare's own strength derives directly from the anger and aspirations of a people let down by a regime that has made corruption its official religion. In a country that is growing demographically younger, it took the audacity of a moral warrior from the remoteness of rural India to make the urban youth stakeholders in politics. Hazare brought We the People to the vanguard of a freedom movement through the politics of conscience.Anna Hazare is INDIA TODAY'S Newsmaker of the Year because the velocity of his rage shattered the cynicism of rulers and restored hope among the ruled. The struggle of Citizen Hazare has redeemed Indian democracy, and empowered the hopeless for a generation. - With Priya SahgalPublished By: AtMigration Published On: Dec 23, 2011 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---

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India Today Newsmaker 2011: Anna Hazare

In a year that witnessed the serial blasts of reputations, it took the audacity of a moral warrior from the rural remoteness of India to inspire a new iconography of heroism.

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