JOIN US Hundreds of thousands of people came out of their homes and offices to support social activist Anna Hazare’s cause celebre - a hunger strike to demand a strong anti-corruption law.
Cutting across age and class, a usually dormant urban middle class joined protests and demonstrations to force a new moral standard on a government accused of failing to deal with corruption. A petition on the internet alone gathered over 2,50,000 signatures in support of the agitation, in just two days.
The protests shook the Congress-led UPA government into action. Now, it has formed a joint committee of ministers and civil society representatives to redraft the official Lokpal Bill. The prime minister and judges may come under the purview of the revised Bill.
Anna has also set twin deadlines - June 30 for completing the Lokpal Bill draft and August 15 for its passage in Parliament so that it does not get stuck as it did over the last 42 years.
What triggered this massive public campaign? Was it pent up frustration against the series of recent corruption scandals? Was it the failure of the government to address the growing sense of helplessness among the citizenry? Or was it the economic hardships caused by rising inflation and unemployment? We present an in depth analysis by two independent observers - Dr Jayaprakash Narayan, a former bureaucrat turned MLA of Kukatpalli Assembly segment in Andhra Pradesh, and Mahesh Vijapurkar, commentator on public affairs.
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