Dear Netters:
As assured in my previous posting, here's the Guardian article on Anna
Hazare's capaign against corruption in India.
Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011 21.51 BST
The practical and sometimes dirty business of power-seeking and
deal-making has in the past been countered in Indian politics by
periodic impulses to transform society root and branch. This dualism
was famously embodied in the divide between Nehru and Gandhi, partners
but also rivals in the Indian independence movement.
The two men had profoundly different ideas on the direction in which
India ought to go, Nehru seeing a future India as a great industrial
and military power, while Gandhi wanted a society which would keep the
worst aspects of modernity at bay while transcending caste, class and
religious differences. Although such later figures as Vinoba Bhave and
JP Narayan carried on to make their mark on India after Gandhi, it has
become commonplace to say that the Gandhian tradition has largely
petered out in recent years.
Not quite. Anna Hazare, the 74-year-old former soldier whose
anti-corruption movement is posing an increasingly serious challenge to
the Indian government, has certainly borrowed both style and technique
from the Mahatma. He wears plain white clothes, if not the actual
homespun on which Gandhi insisted. Like Gandhi, he fasts. Like Gandhi,
he goes to prison – and sometimes refuses to come out. Like Gandhi, he
has a model village, in his case in his home state of Maharashtra. Like
Gandhi, he is against tobacco, alcohol and other drugs. Like Gandhi he
has mobilised large numbers of Indians, many thousands of whom have
been demonstrating in New Delhi and other cities after Manmohan Singh's
government made the mistake of arresting him two days ago. Anger at
corruption, of both the grand and the petty kind, has never been so
intense.
The basic issue is simple. Mr Hazare and his followers want a powerful
anti-corruption agency established, something that various governments
had promised in the past. The prime minister pushed legislation to
create such an agency, but without giving it powers to investigate the
senior judiciary and the prime minister's office, or to pursue the
lower- level officials who make life an expensive hell for Indians
seeking driving licences, passports and other documents. Mr Hazare will
not accept this, while Mr Singh says democracy is being subverted.
Mr Hazare does not have, or aspire to, anything like Gandhi's stature.
He does not confront, as Gandhi did, his followers' complicity in
social evils, an aspect of his career underlined by the subtitle – His
Struggle With India – of a recent book on Gandhi. But Mr Hazare has
found an issue – and is exerting a leverage which on balance must be
good for India.
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