Why God Saved Anna Hazare...

Hazare’s transformation began in 1964 at a Delhi railway station bookstall after he bought a book on Swami Vivekananda's life.

Ralegaon’s self-help efforts are not always looked upon kindly. Once, after the villagers decided they wanted a high-school and constructed a 10-room building themselves, the government refused to provide money for running it. Anna soon discovered the reason: a powerful local politician, annoyed because he’d received no votes in Ralegaon in a recent election, was taking revenge.

Hazare, however, was undeterred. He hired ten teachers, offering them free food and housing in lieu of wages, and got the school going. Then he systematically began to lobby officials both at district headquarters in Ahmadnagar and at the state secretariat in Bombay, 350 kilometres away.

To keep expenses down during his Bombay trips, Hazare slept on newspapers spread out on bus station floors, and bathed in the sea. But for one year, despite 20 visits to Bombay and innumerable more to Ahmadnagar, nothing happened. “Finally,” Hazare says, “I decided I’d had enough.” He descended on Ahmadnagar’s Zilla Parishad office one morning with 250 villagers and announced that they were all going on a hunger strike. Within hours, officials in Bombay sent an assurance that the money would be made available.

Today the school is run on military lines. “That’s where I learnt some discipline,” says Hazare. Students have to jog and exercise daily, and take extra courses in English which, insists Hazare who knows very little of the language himself, “is essential to understand modern science.”

Hazare has tried to modernize age-old social customs too. The Ralegaon Tarun Mandal organizes group marriages thrice a year. Nobody has to spend more than Rs1000; poor families don’t have to pay anything at all. Ralegaon group weddings have become so popular that even girls from neighbouring villages are sometimes married off there.

Untouchability, too, is beginning to lose its force in Ralegaon. Today, the village’s Harijans share the community water tanks with caste Hindus and eat with them at the group marriages. At the village’s annual cattle festival, it’s been a convention to give a Harijan’s bullocks pride of place.

All such progress, Hazare believes, must be based on a deep religious faith. Today, as in the very beginning, the village temple is the heart of Hazare’s movement. Anna himself lives there, in a small room cluttered with files and documents. All day long, the temple is crowded with people attending prayer sessions, religious discourses, and meetings.

The changes in Ralegaon have stimulated people in neighbouring areas to do something about their villages, too. Raghunath Thange, 29, gave up his headmaster’s job at a high school near Ahmadnagar and is now engaged in closing down distilleries in villages. “We’re following in Anna’s footsteps,” he says. “Thanks to him we know what to do.”

Anna wants a lot more for Ralegaon including industries that will keep Ralegaon’s educated youths from leaving the village. As always, he rarely has a spare moment, especially with people from other villages coming to him constantly to discuss their problems or to invite him to address public functions. While I was with him two Muslims youths from neighbouring Sirur town wanted him to talk at a meeting celebrating the Prophet’s birthday. Anna accepted readily. When they left he told me, “I don’t know much about the Prophet, but I’ll give them my message—that to change our nation we have to change our villages, and to do that we have to change ourselves.”

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