Perhaps Hazare personifies divine intervention to spit out graft
The first to surface was the Commonwealth Games scam. Then came the Adarsh Housing Society scam. As if that was not bad enough, we then had the 2G scam – the mother of all scams in recent years. Just look at the amount involved –a whopping Rs176,000 crore (and that may not be the end).
Fortunately, before the next scam raised its head, Anna Hazare put in an appearance in Delhi. He is a true Gandhian, with a single-minded approach towards transparency in the system, and he is determined to fight corruption and see the Lokpal Bill through.
Hazare found a great following the moment he announced his decision to start a movement against corruption. Thousands rose in support. During the five days of his fast at Jantar Mantar to press for his cause, the area around the venue was taken over by thousands of his supporters.
Do scams like CWG, Adarsh and 2G really motivate people to take up cudgels against the government? They perhaps do not affect the masses directly though they do ultimately affect them. The corruption people are most concerned about is what hits them directly on a one-to-one basis. That is what they may be willing to fight.
A few months ago, people started taking to the streets in the Arab nations because they were fed up with inflation, unemployment, corruption, poor living conditions and repressive governments. It resulted in massive political unrest and pro-democracy demonstrations that brought down several governments.
While this was going on, people here wondered whether the waves caused by the revolutions in the Arab nations would hit Indian shores as well. Apparently, somebody forgot to tell them that India is already a vibrant democracy and there is no room for a pro-democracy movement in India! Also, the peoples of those Arab nations may think that democracy is a solution to all their problems but the truth is that democracy is the ultimate dream of most nations until they achieve it and then they find themselves staring at a new problem. That is the case with India.
India went through a long spate of price rise last year. There was a furore in Parliament for weeks and it was not allowed to function for several days. The opposition parties got together, forgetting their ideologies. There was a nationwide bandh call by the opposition parties and the nation came to a standstill. The total loss for a single day was over Rs 1,400 crore.
The Finance Minister invited the opposition leaders to a tea party. After the party, they fell silent. People are still wondering what potion he had added to the tea! How did the price rise issue suddenly get over for the opposition parties when the people saw no difference in the ground realities? The public felt cheated.
So it perceived a ray of hope in Hazare’s movement and joined it. Thus, it was not just the problem of corruption but a mixture of people’s anger against inflation, unemployment, poor living conditions and similar other problems put together which lent strength to Hazare’s movement and made it such a grand success.
But, as we saw, not all those who were turned away by Hazare’s supporters were untouchables. Nor were all those who jumped onto his bandwagon angels in white. It is a mass movement and it takes all kinds of people to make this world. So it is important to carry all shades of people along in such crusades.
Another interesting thing is WikiLeaks owner Julian Assange’s claim that India had not witnessed such a mass movement for a long time and that the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” was responsible for exposing the corruption that led to this movement. But he failed to explain why, then, “Cablegate” had a zero effect on the people of the US, which came in for most criticism on that count.
India is a vast democracy. It has its share of corruption, which is like the termite which eats away at society and the nation and makes them hollow. Nations need churning rods to root out corruption. People like Hazare may be God-sent churning rods for India.
