The Globe and Mail

“We’re sick of giving bribes just to get things done,” said Basanti Devi, 54, who joined a vigil in the heart of New Delhi on Tuesday night. Her husband, son and son-in-law were among those detained at the stadium; she brought her daughters and grandchildren in from their town, two hours from Delhi, to protest. “We must bribe to get our kids into school. To get passports. To register our cars. For anything and everything. But nobody listens to our voices.”

While corruption complicates business and foreign investment, it is not stifling the Indian economy, which will register at least 8 per cent growth this year. And corruption is not, by most reliable indices, worsening. But as the country gets richer, people’s expectations for accountability are changing – faster, it would seem, than government’s sense of them has changed.

In April, when Mr. Hazare began his first fast-unto-death, the government insisted it would not be blackmailed. But cabinet ministers repeatedly met with him and his team; they accepted almost all of the features of his bill into their own law. But when they presented that bill in Parliament a few weeks ago, Mr. Hazare’s team rejected it as too weak (it exempted the prime minister and judges from the ombudsman’s purview) and insisted that the government adopt their bill, or the fast would resume.

During the past weekend, as Mr. Hazare gathered his supporters, the police told him he would have to sign an undertaking limiting his fast to three days and the crowd to 5,000 people. When he refused, he was detained as a threat to law and order.

With its actions yesterday, the Congress-led coalition has eroded any hope the public will notice that it has gone to great lengths to accommodate Mr. Hazare. Now, said political analyst Seema Mustafa, even those who disliked Mr. Hazare or his methods have been turned into defenders.

“This shows the government to be frankly stupid – they’ve given the guy a platform and status. But if they had allowed this thing to go ahead it would probably not have been a big deal,” Ms. Mustafa said. “The only thing we can deduce is that government is so isolated from the people that they have no idea the revulsion at corruption is so great.”

Placards at the protests invoked the 1975 Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and had thousands of opponents arrested. That may be overstatement, but there was much in the day’s frenetic events to elicit an emotional reaction: It was just a day after Independence Day, which commemorates the non-violent struggle waged by Mr. Hazare and others against the repression of the British colonial rulers. Mr. Hazare, saintly in his white homespun kurta, evokes a memory of what feels, these days, like a lost age of morality. And once again it is a Gandhi family member presiding over a government cracking down on its critics.

“I think they thought that by arresting him this movement would slowly fade away,” said Bakhshish Singh, 42, a clothing shop owner who brought his children to a vigil Tuesday night. “But they’re wrong.”