TWELVE DAYS into his hunger strike Anna Hazare on Sunday accepted a glass of coconut water and honey from a five-year-old child to mark the end of his remarkably successful protest fast.
The 74-year-old anti-corruption campaigner, who has consciously modelled himself on Gandhi and has galvanised hundreds of thousands of urban middle-class supporters across India, has secured a commitment from parliament to enact in September the tougher version of an anti-graft ombudsman Bill – the “Lokpal Bill” – which he has championed. He has threatened to resume his fast if an effective law is not instituted. There is no doubt he will do so.
The Congress Party government of Manmohan Singh, which had seriously misjudged Hazare’s support, finally did a U-turn at the weekend and parliament “agreed in principle” to three key demands: that anti-corruption ombudsmen should be appointed in all regional states, that all of officialdom should be covered by the law, not just senior bureaucrats, and that there should be a citizens’ charter for redressing public grievances.
Hazare’s campaign over the last 10 months caught the mood of a public exasperated by a series of major political-commercial scandals in, among other sectors, mining and telecommunications and in the organisation of last year’s Commonwealth Games, and a broader economy-wide culture of corruption that many see as a serious impediment to development.
A recent Transparency International poll recorded that 54 per cent of Indian households acknowledge paying a bribe for essential services in the previous year. It ranks India as the 87th most honest country in the world, located between Malawi and Djibouti. And the Asian Development Bank has estimated that corruption annually costs countries such as India the equivalent of 17 per cent of GDP, about $250 billion in India’s case.
The government’s discomfort at the extra-parliamentary pressure had been reflected, before its U-turn, in speeches condemning Hazare’s alleged subverting of the democratic process and even suggestions his protest was effectively a form of blackmail. That is just grist to Hazare’s and his supporters’ mill – they made clear that their next target is what they see as the imperfect democracy in this land of 1.2 billion. Specifically, they want to turn the country into what they argue would be a genuinely “participatory” democracy by instituting a right to recall and reject MPs and provincial legislators who break electoral promises or are involved in corruption. It will be a formidable challenge.