Story of today’s hottest newsmaker

In the past two weeks a beaky old man in a blinding white cap of homespun cotton has succeeded in putting the Indian government into a tailspin.

Story of today's hottest newsmaker

In the past two weeks a beaky old man in a blinding white cap of homespun cotton has succeeded in putting the Indian government into a tailspin. Kisan Baburao Hazare, now known to all India simply as Annaji, has a bee in his Nehru cap about corruption.

One can think of various ways a wily Indian government might have headed off this initiative. After all, no one disputes Hazare's claim that corruption is one of the country's severest problems. Corruption is everywhere in India, the bane of the common man's life. It is an evil which the liberalisation of the economy did nothing to stem.

Anna Hazare at the Ramlila grounds in New Delhi, where the
septuagenarian staged a fast unto death to convince the Centre to agree
to the demands of Jan Lokpal Bill. Pic/Subhash Barolia

In Manmohan Singh, India has a leader as honest as any in the world. Unfortunately he has ended up as the figleaf for a pack of venal scoundrels, alleged to have made millions out of the Commonwealth Games contracts and a telecom sell-off which left the exchequer some $40bn down. And when Mr Hazare challenged the government to set up an office with the duty and the power to put the guilty in jail, whoever they might be, Singh's government froze like a boy caught with his hand in the sweet jar.

We can blame the rudderlessness of an administration whose guiding light, Sonia Gandhi, is abroad recovering from an operation for an unspecified illness. But it is also clear that in Anna Hazare it has encountered a formidable foe, a folk hero who has emerged like a collective hallucination from the past.

Anna Hazare was born and raised in the poor village of Ralegan Siddhi in western Maharashtra, 60 miles from the city of Pune, a huddle of peasant huts dependent like thousands of other villages across the country on subsistence agriculture. When India went to war with China over Kashmir in 1962, he signed up for the army, aged 23. For more than 15 years he worked as an army lorry driver along the narrow, vertiginous mountainous roads of the frozen north as well as on India's other borders.

But long before he left the army he had already made up his mind about his future path. On 12 November 1965, during India's war with Pakistan, an air raid on India's base at Khem Karan in the Punjab killed all Hazare's comrades, leaving only him alive. It was the turning point in his life: the fact that he had been spared meant his life had a purpose.

Every year he spent his army leave with his family, but on every visit, conditions in the village were worse.
Ralegan Siddhi is in the drought-prone area of Maharashtra. During the frequent droughts, villagers were dependent on government water tankers for drinking water. Farm production plummeted; many villagers walked miles every day to labouring jobs, using the wages to buy grain from better-provided villagers nearby. More enterprising villagers set up drinking dens serving home-distilled "country liquor". The quality of life in the village, never opulent, went from bad to worse.

Hazare resolved to turn the village around. He planned his moves carefully. He took a vow of celibacy, so the need to provide for a family would never distract him from his goal. He remained in the army for another dozen years to qualify for a pension. Then finally in 1977 he returned home for good, and began the task of redeeming the village.

In the process he became one of the green pioneers of the Indian countryside, persuading his fellow villagers to dig wells to harvest rain water, to terrace their fields, to make small dams and weirs to prevent water wastage and to plant thousands of trees. The results were spectacular: the rise in the water table made irrigation available for 1,500 hectares of land instead of 300 hectares before. The village began to prosper. A school, a hostel and a new temple were built.

Following Gandhi's example, Hazare cracked down on the liquor dens: one of the most popular stories about him is how he tied village drunks to trees and flogged them with his army belt. Instead of the villagers walking miles to find work, the village was now importing labour.

This was development as Gandhi had conceived it, small-scale, village-based. And it didn't stop with water: Ralegan Siddhi installed solar power right across the community, with individual panels for the street lights, with the result that it is now self-sufficient in energy. The village's achievements and those of its leader have been recognised with numerous awards at home and abroad.

Hazare came to believe that the problem lay in corruption. In 1991 he set up an organisation known as Public Movement Against Corruption, focusing on a case in which dozens of forest officers had cheated the state out of hundreds of millions of rupees.

He presented the evidence to the government but no action was taken as one of those involved in the scam was a minister in the ruling party. In disgust Hazare returned the high awards he had received from the government, and launched a hunger strike, "unto death" as Gandhi put it. The government caved in: six ministers implicated in the scandal were forced to resign and hundreds of corrupt forest workers were sacked.

Hazare's initiatives on behalf of public morality are thus neither new nor unfamiliar. Perhaps the greatest legacy of Gandhi are highly motivated individuals like him -- another example is the social activist Aruna Roy, founder of the Workers and Peasants' Strength Union, and one of the forces alongside Hazare in getting India's Right to Information law on the statue book. But in the context of Incredible Shining India, galloping along at 8 per cent growth per year, such figures have looked increasingly quaint and irrelevant, relics of a past India was in a hurry to forget.

Suddenly, thanks to the simple commitment of a brave old man, the nation has awoken from its dreams of easy money. Anna Hazare offers his country a mirror: here is the squalid reality behind your prosperity, he says -- and here is the cure.