It was one shocking development after another as India’s simmering feud over corruption burst into a full-scale national drama.
Police arrested an elderly campaigner with a mass following, then released him – or tried to – while streets in cities across the country filled with protesters, angry at both the pervasiveness of bribery and their government’s draconian response. In Parliament, debate over the events descended into hysterical shrieking, and both houses were adjourned.
It began early Tuesday morning, when Delhi police detained a 74-year-old former freedom fighter named Anna Hazare, lately reinvented as the saintly face of the anti-corruption movement, as he was setting out to stage a fast-until-death for anti-graft legislation.
The police rounded up several thousand of his supporters, who had been converging on the park where Mr. Hazare was to hold his protest, and carted them off to a stadium in the north of the city. Thousands more protesters then began to gather outside the stadium. Street demonstrations demanding that Mr. Hazare be given his right to protest broke out in every major city in India.
Mr. Hazare was then taken from a police station to Tihar Jail on a seven-day judicial remand, and, bizarrely, locked up in the same wing that holds Andimuthu Raja, the former telecom minister. Mr. Raja is awaiting trial after being accused of costing the country as much as $40-billion through his graft-filled auction of the 2G cellular network licence. Several other senior government figures implicated in the scam are also held in Tihar.
The police shipped several of Mr. Hazare’s key supporters there, too, including Kiran Bedi, a dedicated social activist who, during her career as inspector-general of prisons, instituted the reforms at Tihar Jail that made it into a top-quality prison that, as a consequence, houses all the allegedly crooked politicians.
As candlelight vigils were staged across many cities, another announcement: Mr. Hazare was being released from jail. India’s hyperkinetic television news channels were soon reporting that it was Rahul Gandhi, son of Indian National Congress Party Leader Sonia Gandhi, who had ordered Mr. Hazare sprung (acting as head of the ruling party because his mother is hospitalized in New York with an ailment Congress won’t specify).
Then, 10 p.m. – more breaking news: Mr. Hazare refused to leave the jail. He said he would not go until he had a promise from government that he could stage his protest under his own conditions. At press time, he was still there. By this point, Mr. Hazare’s supporters seemed ready to collapse from exhaustion, while many people were recoiling from a sense that critical issues were degenerating into farce.
Mr. Hazare emerged from life as a local activist in a village in Maharashtra earlier this year, arriving unheralded to Delhi, vowing to fast until death unless the government took action against corruption. He was angry, in particular, about the 2G scam and he wanted government to pass legislation that would create the post of lokpal, or ombudsman, with the right to investigate all levels of government.
One among many fasters in the circle he chose – Mr. Hazare struck a nerve. People liked that he had once fought with Mahatma Gandhi against the British colonial regime and they liked his simple way of talking. Most of all, they liked that someone was finally overtly challenging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on corruption, which is blatant, ubiquitous, and woven tightly into the fabric of daily life in India.
