“People are convulsing. This is good,” says a man with a trim, grey beard. Nearby, in the shade of a neem tree, protesters with banners and flags listen as a speaker inveighs against corruption. In a tent, a former assemblyman crouches on a platform and calls for criminals to be barred from public office. An assistant explains that he is only on “indicative” hunger strike today, “but his fast until death will start on April 14th.”
Jantar Mantar, a street in the middle of Delhi, is a favourite spot for activists: Tibetans praying for political freedom, students marching to have a headmaster sacked, minor politicians desperate for attention. Few achieve much. But one of them, Anna Hazare, an ageing rural activist with a hint of Gandhi about him, has just scored a tremendous victory.
He had vowed to fast to death unless the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, agreed to push through parliament a long-stalled plan for a Lokpal, a powerful anti-corruption ombudsman. His previous hunger strikes were ignored. Yet this time, to his own surprise, Mr Hazare barely had time to get hungry. On April 9th, four days in, the government conceded everything, agreeing that activists should supply the chairman and half the members of a committee that will draft a new law, which will in theory produce the Lokpal within just a few months.
The government was wise to capitulate. Mr Hazare had caught the public mood. A Facebook campaign sent celebrities, carpetbaggers and young urbanites eager to be jasmine revolutionaries all flocking to Jantar Mantar. Some fasted beside Mr Hazare. Others marched with candles and placards. Support for Mr Singh’s government promised to waste away even quicker than Mr Hazare.
The fight is not yet over, though. Columnists have lined up to snipe at the “Hazare phenomenon”, hinting that an extra-parliamentary movement is undemocratic by definition. Urban activists, a tiny minority, must not force the hands of politicians picked by hundreds of millions, they intone. Mr Hazare has also said some foolish things: for instance, that ordinary folk are too stupid to understand the value of their vote, giving it away for cash or a new sari. He has also lost some shine after calling for crooked officials to be executed, and praising Gujarat’s hardline Hindu nationalist chief minister, Narendra Modi.
Now the two sides must reconcile their ideas for the anti-corruption body. A longstanding government draft bill for a Lokpal wastes the paper it is written on. It would set up another toothless body, unable to investigate elected officials and under the thumb of public figures who have let corruption flourish for decades. The activists’ ideas are fresher: Nobel laureates, judges, the electoral commission and other notables would pick Lokpal members. It would get powers to start investigations, even of the prime minister, and to suspend elected officials, even cabinet ministers, suspected of corruption.
The disagreement is about power. The activists say corruption will be curbed only when independent officials of high integrity are appointed to wield an effective stick over elected ones. That is unconstitutional, the politicians retort: in a democracy it must be voters, not Nobel laureates, who decide. The politicians are unlikely to back down, especially once a series of state elections is out of the way, in May. Assuming he has the stomach for it, Mr Hazare may well be back in Jantar Mantar this summer.
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