India's graft buster has his critics

NEW DELHI: The rapid rise of India's Anna Hazare from local activist to national anti-corruption saviour has not been without its critics, some of whom see serious flaws in both the man and his tactics.

The extensive and overwhelmingly supportive media coverage of Hazare's campaign for tougher laws against official graft has largely drowned out the dissenters, but they have not been silenced altogether.

One high-profile critic is Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of software giant Infosys Technologies who is currently heading a government project to provide biometric ID cards to India's 1.2 billion people.

In an interview with the NDTV news channel, Nilekani said Hazare's populist campaign was simplistic and "uni-dimensional" with its focus on forcing the government to strengthen an anti-corruption bill currently before parliament.

"I am not a great believer that if you pass a law, corruption will miraculously vanish," Nilekani said, suggesting that Hazare had raised people's expectations to unrealistic levels.

"If you really want to address corruption, it is a very multi-dimensional mosaic of things ... There is no quick fix. This requires hard work."

Hazare's protest is centred on the so-called "Lokpal Bill," which would create the post of an ombudsman to monitor senior politicians and bureaucrats.

The 74-year-old activist strongly opposes the bill's exclusion of the prime minister and top judicial officials from the ombudsman's scrutiny and is currently staging a 15-day fast to demand that the legislation be re-drafted.

Nilekani said the use of a hunger strike to try and force the legislative hand of an elected parliament was "extremely dangerous and completely wrong" in a country proud to be known as the world's largest democracy.

Prominent Supreme Court lawyer Pinky Anand voiced similar reservations over what she saw as the rigidity of Hazare's position in his standoff with the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"We have a situation where we have an elected parliament which is mandated to prescribe, enact and enforce laws, and a person who is saying 'my way or the highway'," Anand told AFP. "It's an aberration of democracy."

Hazare argues that he has a "people's mandate" -- a claim vividly backed up on Friday by the hundreds of thousands of ecstatic supporters who cheered him through the streets of Delhi as he set off to begin his public hunger strike.

"Anna is India and India is Anna" was the way one of his top advisers and senior campaign leaders, Kiran Bedi, put it in an emotional speech to the crowds gathered at the protest site.

But Delhi University political analyst Rajendra Dayal countered that populist support was not a licence for dictating policy.

"Hazare cannot just say whatever he wants should be accepted. In a democracy there is a deliberative process which needs to be respected," Dayal said.

And there are some flickers of a possible media backlash, with an editorial in The Hindu newspaper on Saturday under the title "Anna is not India, nor India Anna."

Noting Hazare's commitment to the guiding philosophies of his hero Mahatma Gandhi, The Hindu suggested that India's independence icon would have been horrified by the "mood of triumphalism" that has crept into the Hazare camp.

"Democratic, progressive, political India needs to find its own way," the editorial said.

Anupama Jha, who heads the Indian chapter of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, said there was much to be admired in Hazare's success in pushing corruption up the political agenda.

But, like Nilekani, she questioned the basis of the growing belief among Hazare's supporters that a stronger Lokpal Bill would act as a panacea to purge India's corruption woes.

"The law he wants will, at best, only act as a deterrent because implementation is such a difficult issue," Jha said, pointing to the deep roots the corruption culture has laid down over the decades.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011