Most of the stadiums put up in Delhi for last autumn’s Commonwealth Games have already fallen into disrepair. Built at huge cost, and in some cases after thousands of slum-dwellers were turfed out, they stand as a leaking monument to what many now see as the self-serving nature of the nation’s political class. Many Indians, and especially the professionals who make up most of the country’s tiny income tax base, have had enough.
This is why Anna Hazare, the veteran activist who has been on hunger strike to demand a draconian set of anti-corruption measures, is winning such astonishing support. The games were but one example of corruption on such a scale as to make irrefutable what most have long assumed: public infrastructure is normally only an incidental byproduct of the real business of Indian politics, which is business.
Mr Hazare’s fearlessness, his Gandhian tactics and his attempts to distance his campaign from entrenched political interests, fill many with a hope that honesty can return to public life. Yet the impulse behind these protests is not necessarily generous or gentle. The Indian middle classes want to seize back what they consider to have been taken from them. Sceptics also rightly note an authoritarianism lurking behind the movement – for Mr Hazare is also a self-righteous figure who believes in the most violent kinds of punishment for those who betray his vision.