INDIA’S premier has called an all-party meeting tomorrow to seek an end to nationwide protests led by a 74-year self-styled Gandhian activist whose health is a growing concern as he enters a second week of fasting.
Anna Hazare has lost nearly six kgs (13.2 lbs) since he began his fast to demand a bill for creating an autonomous powerful anti-corruption agency, a campaign that has drawn support from the middle class and seen tens of thousands protest against Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s government.
Hazare remained lying on a public stage on open ground in the capital New Delhi, surrounded by hundreds of supporters in the monsoon heat where open toilets and spilling waste were starting to cause outbreaks of food poisoning and illnesses.
“His health is weakening by the hour,” Kiran Bedi, a former police officer and one of India’s best known anti-graft campaigners who works with Hazare, told reporters.
“But so far the doctors say he is not in danger.”
But while Dr Singh has hinted he is open to dialogue and there are moves to tweak the government’s own heavily-criticised graft bill in parliament to meet some of Hazare’s demands, Dr Singh still has not sent any official representatives to meet with Hazare.
“I only see that the government is organising itself, but nothing in concrete has come to us,” Bedi said.
Hazare, who has carried out scores of hunger strikes over the last few decades to pressure governments, has been visited by Hindu gurus, former judges and Bollywood actors. But he has refused to have any politicians on his stage.
Hazare’s deteriorating health could force the government to decide whether to force feed him – a move that could spark further protests against a fumbling government of elderly ministers widely seen as out of touch.
A group of left and regional party members staged a sit in of parliament today, one of two opposition party protests against the government this week. The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is organising a nationwide protest against the government on Thursday (August 25).
In another sign of possible compromise, Jairam Ramesh, a minister and Congress Party stalwart, publicly lent support to Hazare’s demand that his team only negotiate with mediators from the prime minister’s office, or with Rahul Gandhi, the son of the Congress party chief, as opposed to a third party.
“That is a way out,” Jairam Ramesh told reporters yesterday. He also said the government was mulling introducing a separate bill to tackle graft in the lower orders of bureaucracy, which had been another demand from Hazare.
But criticism of Hazare’s hunger strike has also surfaced from activists and academics who say it is setting a bad precedent by holding democratic institutions hostage with his uncompromising stand. There have been criticisms from Muslim groups that he is too close to radical Hindu groups.
