Anna Hazare: How an army truck driver became Gandhian activist

Khemkaran, September 1965. An Indian military convoy rumbles towards the fighting zone. Suddenly, two Pakistani Sabre jets drop out of the sky and scream in to attack. As bombs begin exploding around him, Kishan Baburao Hazare, driving a truck full of soldiers, speeds up. But when a splinter grazes his forehead, he ducks below the dashboard and jams on the brakes with his hands. The windscreen shatters and bullets riddle the man sitting next to Hazare. The 25-year-old driver tumbles out of his truck and prays fervently as the two Sabres strafe the convoy again. When they finally disappear, dozens of jawans lie dead. Of the few survivors, only Hazare escapes serious injury. "You saved me, God," Hazare says, over and over again. "But why?" At the village of Ralegaon Siddhi, I discovered why God saved Baburao Hazare. In the 1970s, Ralegaon Siddhi wasn't very different from hundreds of other villages in this arid part of Maharashtra's Ahmadnagar district. With water available only during the monsoons, its farmers could barely grow one crop a year, and 70 percent of the village's 315 families lived in abject poverty. Indeed, Ralegaon Siddhi's most distinctive feature was its 40 illicit distilleries that made the village a popular haunt for drunks and gamblers. Thefts and brawls were commonplace. Since he returned to Ralegaon Siddhi in 1975, Hazare has spearheaded a movement that has changed all this for ever. Today, Ralegaon Siddhi is brisk and prosperous. Signs of rural modernity abound. Its fields are heavy with grain; there's a bank, a boarding school, biogas plants; some of its farmers drive around on mopeds. Even more remarkable is the social transformation that Hazare has wrought. No one drinks in Ralegaon Siddhi. Only a handful smoke. There hasn't been a crime here in years. Even the practice of untouchability has weakened. "Thanks to Hazare," said the former Collector of Ahmadnagar, Rajiv Agarwal, "scores of other villages here and in neighbouring districts look to Ralegaon for inspiration." It's hard to believe that Hazare could be responsible for all this. He's a short, thin, mild-looking fellow; the kind of person you wouldn't look at twice. Nor is his background the stuff from which leaders are supposed to be made. The son of a poor farmer, Hazare never got beyond the seventh class in school. As a young man his fiery temper constantly got him into trouble: once he had the Bombay police after him when he beat up a cop who had been harassing hawkers. He was known as a troublemaker in the army too. Soon after he enlisted, he discovered that a senior officer was embezzling mess funds. He publicly questioned the officer -  and was posted to far-off NEFA as a punishment. The story of Hazare's transformation began in 1964 at a Delhi railway station bookstall after he bought a book on Swami Vivekananda. Enthralled by the great sage's life and by his dictum that the noblest thing a man can do is work for the good of others, Hazare avidly began reading religious texts and biographies of social reformers. And after his escape from the Sabre jets at Khemkaran, Hazare became a vegetarian, gave up cigarettes and liquor, and vowed to remain a bachelor devoting himself to public service. A worthy cause, he realized, lay right in front of him: The upliftment of his own village, Ralegaon Siddhi. During his annual visits home, Hazare had been appalled by its steady deterioration - even the village temple had become badly run down. "If I could re-build the temple," Hazare said to himself, "more people might think of God and lead better lives." But he didn't have the money; nor could he leave the army just yet - to qualify for a pension he had to serve for several years more. Finally, in August 1975, Hazare returned to Ralegaon after retiring from the army. His service benefits amounted to Rs20,000 and he planned to spend the money rebuilding the village temple. He hired carpenters and masons, and helped them lay bricks and lug wood. Few people paid him any attention at first. But as the temple neared completion, the villagers began changing. Some offered to donate wood; many volunteered their labour. "This taught me one thing," Hazare says. "If people are convinced that you are not selfish, they're on your side." Among those who joined Hazare were a few young men. They called him "Anna" - big brother - and listened with fascination to his dream of transforming their village. Gradually, more youths joined the group, and Hazare suggested they form a Tarun Mandal [youth club]. One night, a few Tarun Mandal members rushed to the temple with the news that some drunks from a neighbouring village had beaten up Gulab Bhalekar, a 40-year-old Ralegaon farmer, because he had not saluted them. Anna seized the opportunity to call a village meeting at which he lashed out against drinking, illicit distilling and gambling. "I'm warning all distillers here," he said. "Shut shop!" Some distillers, fearing Anna and his boys, readily complied. Others had their liquor dens smashed up. But Hazare was not content with simply putting an end to the illegal distilling. "You can drink elsewhere," he told villagers. "But if anyone here is found drunk, he'd better watch out." He soon proved he meant business. A few days later when three men returned to Ralegaon drunk after a binge in a nearby village, Hazare had them tied to the temple pillars and personally flogged them with his army belt. Anna Hazare is unfazed by criticism of such behaviour. "Rural India is a harsh society," he says, "if you want change, it's sometimes necessary to be tough." Indeed, no one I met at Ralegaon holds Hazare's harshness against him. "I was a miserable drunk nine years ago," said 44-year-old Haribhau Mapari, a Ralegaon farmer. "But after being thrashed, I've not touched a drop of liquor. Anna saved me." Though drink had blighted the lives of Ralegaon Siddhi's residents, Hazare soon realized that a far more important reason for the villagers' misery was lack of work. In fact, because many of the villagers had worked for the bootleggers, shutting down the distilleries had, ironically, made several families even poorer. As he wondered what could be done, Hazare chanced upon a newspaper article about a state government scheme that provided manual labour jobs on public works projects. He and the Tarun Mandal boys quickly rounded up about 200 villagers who needed work and got jobs for all of them. This taught Hazare another important lesson: The government runs a number of rural development schemes, but because they were poorly publicized, illiterate villagers rarely get to hear about them. By finding out what schemes existed and studying them carefully, Hazare could help villagers take advantage of them. Accordingly, Hazare decided to find out as much as he could about these development projects. He haunted government offices, talked to every bureaucrat he could, read several newspapers and built up files on government development schemes. "He was extraordinarily persistent," recalled M.D. Sukhatme, executive engineer in Ahmadnagar's irrigation department. "I remember him at one meeting, sitting on the floor, listening intently to a technical discussion on water management." Since Ralegaon suffered from acute water scarcity, Hazare was especially interested in irrigation techniques. Reading about a successful water conservation project near Purandhar, about 100 kilometres away, Anna studied the system and got engineers to draw up plans for a similar facility at Ralegaon. And by persuading villagers to do much of the work themselves, he got the facilities built at the lowest possible cost. "Building the temple had taught villagers the benefits of working together," says Hazare. "Since then shramdan [self-help] has been our way of life." Today, much of Ralegaon's farmland is irrigated. Agricultural incomes have increased remarkably, and very few villagers live below the poverty line. Not only have living standards risen, dozens of villagers are now free of debt. "I was able to pay back Rs40,000 in debts that I'd accumulated over the years," farmer Nana Auti told me proudly, "Since then I've also built a new house." 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." Anna Hazare was a relatively unknown figure when this article was first published in 1986. Since then, Hazare has won innumerable awards and honours including the Padma Bhushan. Today, he is nationally known for his many crusades, especially against corruption. It was largely due to him that Maharashtra's Right to Information Act was passed and then amended in 2006. Meanwhile, Ralegaon Siddhi has become a model  for many other villages in the country.