Dear Friends:
From N Y Times (23 03 2021) March 21, 2012, 7:49 AM A Hunger Artist By DAN MORRISON Indranil Mukherjee/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Anna Hazare in December 2011. DHAKA, Bangladesh — On Monday, in a display of rank opportunism, the celebrity anticorruption campaigner Anna Hazare jumped onto the bandwagon of a leading Indian environmentalist who is on the 42nd day of a hunger strike to protect the Ganges River. Hazare’s belated endorsement of G.D. Agrawal, the dean of India’s environmental engineers, shows how desperate the good-government zealots of his “Team Anna” have become since their movement briefly shook India and then deflated. Last summer, Hazare and his minions were riding high on a media-amplified campaign to ram a utopian anticorruption law through Parliament. Their short-lived agitation for the creation of an all-powerful anti-graft ombudsman position began, fittingly enough, with a four-day fast by Hazare that received saturation news coverage. High on the attention, Hazare and his people couldn’t spare a moment for the Ganges activists begging for their help. At the time, a young swami namedNigamanand was starving himself to death in the northern city of Haridwar to stop illegal quarrying of the Ganges riverbed. Nigamanand died on June 13, unnoticed and unheralded. Now, the anticorruption law is in tatters after the upper house of Parliament declined to pass it. And with the media looking elsewhere, Team Anna has taken up the Ganges cause. “I will support him,” Hazare told the Press Trust of India on Monday, after a two-hour hospital visit with Agrawal in New Delhi. “He is fighting for the holy river.” By then, the 80-year-old Agrawal had already suffered a heart attack and endured a botched attempt at force-feeding while in state custody. Ganges activism would seem to be a good fit for Hazare’s anticorruption agenda: construction mafias and their allies in government pillage the riverbank daily for sand and stones. The sacred waters are polluted by factories whose managers pay bribes for the privilege. The raising of expensive dams brings a fortune in kickbacks to politicians and regulators. But last May, as Nigamanand was dying for these very issues, Team Anna looked the other way. When Vijay Verma, a lay member of the ashram to which Nigamanand belonged, asked Hazare’s top organizer for assistance, he got the brush-off. “He was very strange to me,” Verma told me last year, recalling a conversation with Arvind Kejriwal, who one magazine has dubbed “Anna’s General.” “He said, ‘I have my own struggle. We are busy in our own struggle.’ As if this saint’s life weren’t in the balance.” On Monday morning, however, as news of Agrawal’s fast began to spread on the Internet, Kejriwal started drumming up support on Twitter, that crucible of armchair revolutionaries. Whatever you may think of the efficacy of political fasts — Agrawal’s demand for a complete moratorium on Ganges River dams seems unlikely — the threat of death has a way of separating the saints from the softies. Hazare, who is 74, would seem to be among the latter. His movement began with that four-day fast last April. In August, with hundreds of thousands of supporters jamming the streets of New Delhi, he went 12 days without food, relenting only when Parliament reluctantly agreed to take up his anticorruption bill. It was Team Anna’s high-water mark. By December, however, Hazare had to cancel a new fast after only one day amid low public interest. He now plans to hold a one-day fast on March 25 to draw attention to the cause of murdered whistleblowers. Similarly, in June, the popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev, an ally of Hazare, fasted “unto death” for a mere nine days. Compare these relatively brief efforts with the iron commitments of three men fighting for a clean and free-flowing Ganges: the late Nigamanand (68 days); Nigamanand’s teacher, Swami Shivanand (21 days, in 2000); andAgrawal (who hasn’t eaten since Feb. 8 or taken water since March 8). Agrawal is receiving intravenous fluids against his will. It might seem that Anna Hazare has lent his star power to Agrawal and the Ganges cause. In fact, it’s the other way around _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
