With Yoga and Fasting, Graft Fighters Shake India

For more than 40 years, reformers and other agitators have tried in vain to cleanse India of corruption. They have staged demonstrations, candlelight vigils and protest marches for naught. In Parliament, efforts to create an independent anticorruption agency began in 1968. It still does not exist. Given this legacy of failure, an unexpected development is now stirring up the world’s largest and most raucous democracy: the agitators are on a hot streak. Government ministers are frantically trying to persuade one of India’s most popular gurus to call off a nationwide yoga rally against corruption — yes, a yoga protest — and a mass hunger strike, scheduled to begin Saturday. Already, the government has capitulated to the demands of another hunger-striking anticorruption crusader.

For an Indian public disgusted by worsening corruption, the hunger strikes and yoga sit-ins are spectacles of political theater embroidering what is actually a fight over how to fix the rusted gears of India’s democracy. Reformers want an anticorruption agency with sweeping powers, and the governing Congress Party has promised to propose legislation in the summer session of Parliament. MORE..http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/world/asia/03india.html