A hunger strike is not an uncommon form of protest in India. Mahatma Gandhi famously employed it against British colonial rule in India in the early twentieth century, and since then, it has been used quite often—for example, when activist Medha Patkar protested against the construction of the dam over the Narmada river. It is, therefore, an old and culturally well-understood form of protest by Indians. However, Gandhi’s approach to effective change was to act locally and stay rooted in one’s own context by doing what one could, where one could and where one had a community. Patkar’s movement against the Narmada dam also pivots on the same theory—rooted in the indigenous political culture, where action is local but has an effect at the power centre. This was not the case with India’s anti-corruption movement, which organized itself strategically and consciously across cities as a nationwide urban movement via a much-publicized, centrally located hunger strike.
On 5 April 2011 at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a landmark symbolizing Indian scientific genius, Hazare went on a hunger strike, with images of Gandhi and ‘Mother India’ behind him. On the first day of Hazare’s hunger strike, a dismal crowd of only a few hundred people gathered at the venue. However, Indian television channel editors, covering the rapid spread of people-driven social movements in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, got the perfect image of public frustration in India too—the sight of a pained and fasting Hazare atop a raised platform in Jantar Mantar. The media amplified this protest of a hitherto little-known social activist through heady comparisons with Gandhian satyagraha.
As a result, over the following days, Indians from almost 400 cities joined the movement, believing that they too had finally achieved their own, well-deserved revolution in the spring, and hoping that the movement would ultimately result in the redistribution of wealth from their wealthier compatriots to them.16
Hazare broke his fast on 9 April 2011, the fourth day of the hunger strike, as soon as the government issued a notification in the Gazette of India on the formation of a joint committee for the drafting of the Jan Lokpal Bill.17
Over the next two years, Arvind Kejriwal, the instigator of India’s anti-corruption movement, created and expanded the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to ensure the direct political involvement of the anti-corruption brigade. In the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, the AAP emerged as the second-largest party, winning twenty-eight of the seventy seats, making Kejriwal the chief minister of Delhi. But with no party obtaining an overall majority, it formed a minority government with conditional support from the Congress. An important part of the AAP agenda was to quickly introduce the Jan Lokpal Bill in Delhi, but it could not gather support from the other major parties. In a dramatic sequence of events, Kejriwal resigned only forty-nine days after coming to power in 2014. The following year, in the 2015 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, the AAP came to power again after winning a majority—sixty-seven of the seventy seats—in the assembly.
Even though the annual Central Vigilance Report declared within a year that the number of corruption complaints against the government of Delhi had declined—969 in 2016 compared to 5139 in 201518—nothing much has changed in the private sector. Businesses in India are still rife with the usual biases, extortion and exploitative behaviour. However, the politicization of India’s anti-corruption movement, thanks to the creation and success of the AAP, has made the anti-corruption drive in the private sector a political issue as well. Political parties realized that the anti-corruption agenda had a strong grip on the emotions of the common Indian, so much so that the AAP could leverage those emotions to form a majority government in the country’s capital.
Riding on this anti-corruption wave, in 2014, Narendra Modi won the elections and became prime minister partly on the basis of his promise to tackle corruption. But corruption is still thriving. The international anti-corruption organization Transparency International conducted face-to-face detailed interviews with a sample group of 3000 Indians between March and April 2016, and published the results in a public report.19 The organization found that 69 per cent, or nearly seven in ten interviewees, had to pay a bribe to access public services.20 The report ranked India as the most corrupt country in the Asia-Pacific.
Modi’s 8 November 2016 decision to demonetize high-value currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000—which represented 86 per cent of the money in circulation at that time21—was presented as an effort to rid the country of unaccounted wealth and to push towards a cash-free economy. Modi reiterated several times that the demonetization initiative was part of a larger plan to combat corruption, and that the resulting economic system would provide for a level playing field to empower the poor.
But in reality, the impoverished were the most adversely affected by demonetization. The most impoverished in India are unbanked and literally cash-less. They have no money for even one meal a day, and with a shortage of cash, they are the ones starving to death. They queue up at ATMs night and day. They do not have access to the digital economy, with no chance of logging on to the Internet and buying their meals online. Their lack of access to the digital economy is not their fault, but an institutional failure of wealth distribution efforts in India. Each of the hundred or so deaths that occurred while standing outside ATMs in the aftermath of demonetization was of someone poor—not wealthy.22 The woman who gave birth while waiting in
