An honest, unmarried soldier who owns nothing but a bowl and his rough clothes with no bank balance (let alone billions in foreign banks) from a village of India has come forward to put an end to the suffering and the ill-treatment the masses are subjected to. India is rich in natural resources and manpower. It has developed industrially too and is on the threshold of becoming an economic power in the world! But 500 million Indians live below the poverty line (who get less than $1.25 a day) and more than 25% of them live with less than Rs12- a day (a quarter of a $). They don’t get a square meal; they do not have a house or proper clothes. Most of their children are malnourished, stunted or wasted. Millions of women die during childbirth. About half of all men and women are emaciated and sick most of the time. Illiteracy rate runs very high in rural areas and women give birth to half a dozen or more children who cannot be fed, clothed or educated. 30% of the population goes without any sanitation and thousands of women scavenge manually human excreta for a living.
With Independence, the Indian leaders started exploiting the masses. The political families, and their sycophants, the regional chieftains and their singers, the innumerable government employees (a big bureaucracy was the creation of Nehru - a large chunk ofl the revenue collected by the Center has to be earmarked for the salary of the bureaucracy- which brought in corruption at all levels and stifled industrial growth) all started exploiting the poor masses with the effect that it divided the society into two classes: the haves and the have-nots. There are a number of programs launched for the poor by the government but not even 20% of the money allotted reaches them; most if it is gobbled up by the leaders and the employees midway. A poor man is at the mercy of the bureaucrats and the rulers; the latter can manipulate them in the name of religion, caste, and parochial issues. Corruption has grown to such an extent that almost 27billion (2,70,000 millions of rupees) is drained away into the secret foreign accounts every year!. See where the wealth of this fabulously rich nation goes! To safeguard the same, the CBI is kept in the grip of the ruling party. The black money accounts holders of foreign banks are kept a top secret. (Is the thief within the vessel itself?)
Anna Hazare has no wealth or power. He wants dignity to be restored to the common man. He wants to stop the exploitation of the poor by the political leaders and the bureaucracy. Even his team is now haunted by the CBI and the other law-enforcement agencies. It is time for another freedom struggle, for another revolution to free the poor from the chains of exploitation, corruption and manipulation. Is it the intention of the rulers to keep the masses poor and uneducated so that the majority can be swindled to vote in their favor by playing caste, regional and religious sentiments? Has democracy any meaning in India where people are illiterate and ignorant of the real motives of the politicians? They manipulate the teeming masses with clever gimmicks like sleeping for a night in a poor man’s hut, raving about a village woman’s plight or openly supporting the Moslem community (16% votes but they remain poor) through the print and visual media which they control with their money power. The earlier rulers were chasing poverty from the soil of India by catchy slogans (which they wrote all over the place) like ‘Garibi Hatao,’(throw away poverty) and ‘ India is on the move.’ They also managed to explode a crude nuclear device and made the Indian media rave about “India is in the nuclear Club” in the 1970s. Was it of any help to the poor masses? They send rockets to the outer atmosphere and to the Moon in the name of space exploration when majority of the rural population have no toilet, road or electricity! Our defense budget is the one of the highest where graft is rampant. Anna Hazare is determined to book the corrupt and make democracy a reality in this impoverished country. Let us all wish him good and strengthen his feeble hands in his relentless fight against the all-pervasive evil of this great nation and usher in a revolution.
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