South Asia Citizens Web

Hazare has been projected as a messiah and a parallel national power centre. His team demands that its bill be instantly passed in its pristine form – on pain of the government being toppled. This subverts debate and imposes the will of a handful of people on the nation. Team Hazare members openly question even parliament’s legislative supremacy.

The Anna Hazare agitation is showing signs of becoming a political and social monster. There are several disturbing elements already in evidence, perhaps more disturbing than the awfulness of corruption. Whatever one thinks of the anti-corruption bill drafted by the government, the agitation, by the day, is growing scarier. There is a combustible mix here of hero worship, cult propagation, populist absolutism and irrational exuberance, mass hysteria, de-politicization, militarization, and, increasingly, signs that religion and agitation politics are being intermeshed.

We have been opposing the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) ever since it was conceived in the mid-1980s. The people of Koodankulam village themselves were misled by false promises such as 10,000 jobs, water from Pechiparai dam in Kanyakumari district, and fantastic development of the region. We tried in vain to tell them that they were being deceived. Without any local support, we could not sustain the anti-Koodankulam movement for too long. Now the people of Koodankulam know and understand that this is not just a fisherfolk’s problem, they may be displaced, and they have to deal with radioactive poison. Their joining the movement in 2007 has invigorated the campaign now. And (almost) all of us here in the southernmost tip of India oppose the Koodankulam NPP for a few specific reasons . . .

Why are such masses of people (apparently: in our village some came out for a morcha organized by the Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti) following Anna Hazare, when it is now clear that his Lokpal is an authoritarian, centralized and undemocratically pushed proposal?

Anna Hazare’s second fast (August 2011) in Delhi, demanding the acceptance of his teams’ draft for Janlokpal bill has raised many different debates about the nature of this upsurge and how the social action groups, engaged in the process of struggle for Human rights of different sections of society, should relate to such movements.