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The Moral Compass Issue

Stay Hungry and Update Your Status Frequently

It's easy to compare Anna Hazare, perhaps India's most famous activist, to Mahatma Gandhi. Like Gandhi's, Hazare's wardrobe consists of homespun cotton dhotis, spectacles, and sandals.

Anticorruption crusader Anna Hazare is so beloved in India people put his face on sticks and wave them around.  AP Photo/Ajit Solanki It’s easy to compare Anna Hazare, perhaps India’s most famous activist, to Mahatma Gandhi. Like Gandhi’s, Hazare’s wardrobe consists of homespun cotton dhotis, spectacles, and sandals. He also engages in public hunger strikes and one-man protests, such as refusing to leave his jail cell for extended periods. But there’s one important difference: As Hazare engages in traditional civil disobedience, his media guru busily posts updates about Hazare’s status to his Facebook page. This powerful combination of 20th- and 21st-century activism has caught on among Indians, who have recently been organizing in huge numbers to protest against what they call the massive and stifling corruption strangling the country.  Hazare’s latest action was a 19-day vow of silence that he broke by declaring his intention to run in India’s upcoming state-assembly elections if the Jan Lokpal Bill—anticorruption legislation that would create the position of an independent “ombudsman” department to investigate government wrongdoing—didn’t pass during parliament’s winter session. Activists have been trying to get something resembling the Jan Lokpal Bill through the legislature for decades, but this campaign seems more likely to succeed than past efforts. The Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh has been in a tailspin ever since Hazare’s “India Against Corruption” movement began in January. Shivendra Chauhan, the 34-year-old guru responsible for much of the movement’s online presence, believes in the cause so much he took a leave of absence from his day job as a journalist to focus on his unpaid social-media role. “We’ve struck a chord with people who are fed up with corruption,” he says. “From the flaws and embarrassment of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, to the 2G spectrum scam, which is said to have cost an estimated $38 billion in graft, to inflation on basic commodities like petrol and onions.” The movement’s Facebook page has half a million followers, which sounds like a lot until you consider that India has a population of 1.2 billion. But Chauhan says numbers aren’t important. “It’s about what you do with those numbers and the quality of people you get that really makes a difference,” he explains. “The middle-class people play the most crucial role because they have to. The poor people don’t have access or time for social movements, and the upper class are just not bothered.” Vikram Sharma, a real estate agent in New Delhi, is one of those middle-class people, and he has high hopes for Hazare.“If the Anna Hazare movement is successful, it will change the living standards of people like me,” he says. “Today, if you want to get anything done in dealing with a government department, it is a living hell. We have to bribe for each and every thing. All these things stop small entrepreneurs like myself from growing.”