Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare is just another Indian aam aadmi. But what makes him Anna (elder brother) Hazare is his resolve not to remain resigned to circumstances.

    Hazare (74) had a normal ‘aam aadmi’ childhood and experienced poverty in all its manifestations with six siblings at Bhingar (his birth place, near Ahmednagar), Ralegan Siddhi (his ancestral village, also in Ahmednagar district) and Dadar (in today’s Mumbai) where he sold flowers as a teenager for a living. He went to school in Mumbai and studied up to 7th class because of a relative who took him to the city of celluloid dreams. His brothers and sisters remained in the village. Like hundreds of villages, Ralegan Siddhi had no school in those days.

Anna Hazare

   Another uneventful chapter opened for Anna after the Chinese invasion in 1962. Patriotism or poverty or a mixture of both made him a soldier. How he was recruited remains a mystery since he does not have the physique that army code prescribes. But the money he saved made him somebody in Ralegan Siddhi by the time he ended his military service as a truck driver ‘honourably’ in 1975. Recalling his ‘army days’, Anna said recently that he was the sole survivor of enemy attack on a border post in the Khem Karan sector. “The experience sent me thinking. I felt that God wanted me to stay alive for some reason. And I decided to dedicate my new life to serving people”.

   Ralegan Siddhi is a shining testimony to his service to people. His savings, small donations that came in response to his call and ‘shram daan’ by elders and youth alike made the village overcome acute poverty, hopelessness, low literacy, and a fragile ecosystem. His activism resulted in a Grain Bank for food security, watershed embankments to impound rain water for irrigation (1000 hectares up from 28 hectares in 1975), dairy farming as a steady subsidiary occupation, promotion of girl education, and an end to debt trap, liquor sales, and untouchability. Marriages of Dalits have become a part of community marriages. Government of India honoured him in 1992 with Padma Bhushan.

   Social activism and vigilantism are two sides of the same coin for Anna. And his Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Aandolan targeted small ticket corruption like collusion between forest officers and timber merchants. Soon, his protests attracted media attention and became a nightmare to the rulers. BJP-Shiv Sena combine felt the Anna effect when a minister was forced to resign in April 1999. Four years later Congress- NCP alliance ‘lost’ three ministers to a nine-day Anna fast (and to the labours of a one-man commission).

   His campaign in 2006 has more or less ended arbitrary and frequent transfers. Regulation of Transfers and Prevention of Delay in Discharge of Official Duties Act mandates a minimum three–year stay at a post. Officials, who move files slowly - a practice that breeds corruption- face disciplinary action.

   Another big ticket fight of Anna Hazare resulted in the rollback of a policy framed to encourage production of liquor from food grains. He undertook a fast in March 2010 at Shirdi and carried the day with the argument that food-deficit Maharashtra cannot waste its food grains for the ‘spirits’ of a few.

   2011 saw Anna emerge on the national scene as the gifted crusader against graft. And his ‘India Against Corruption’ (IAC) platform has become a must study on mobilising new media (Internet, Twitter) for saturation coverage on old media (Print, TV).

   There is not much recorded ‘history’ to show how IAC has evolved but a history is in the making in India which is content to see Mahatma Gandhi on its currency notes and to expose Gandhi statutes to the elements at every cross road.