Indian Guru Plans Hunger Strike Against Corruption

Indian yoga guru Baba Ramdev plans to go on a hunger strike in New Delhi Saturday in protest against official corruption in the country. Over the past few days, the Indian government has been working to persuade the popular guru to not begin his protest. Anchor Aaron Schachter gets the details from The World’s Alex Gallafent from Bangalore, India.

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AARON SCHACHTER: An Indian yoga guru plans to go on a hunger strike in New Delhi tomorrow in protest against official corruption in the country.  The guru in question is Baba Ramdev.  He has an enormous following in India, but there are also devotees in other places around the world including the United States.  Some of those followers say they will fast too, in support of their guru.  Over the past few days the Indian government has been working to persuade Baba Ramdev to not begin his protest.  The World’s Alex Gallafent is in Bangalore in Southern India.  Alex, what is going on here?

ALEX GALLAFENT: Well Aaron, official corruption is one of the standard threads of Indian life.  It’s hard to find issues unaffected by it, or to find people without opinions about it.  Now, there have been calls to deal with corruption for decades, but really nothing has been done about it.  Now in recent months, things got really, really bad for the government here.  A series of major corruption scandals rocked the government on its heels.  First there was a scandal surrounding the allocation of telecom licenses, politicians were accused of selling political access of and skimming funds for themselves, and that resulted in the local government responsible being voted out of office last month.  And then there were the well-publicized problems with the mounting of the Commonwealth Games, and there were accusations that contracts for those games were awarded improperly.  So in general there’s just a sense here that the system isn’t up to the task of dealing with corruption.

SCHACHTER: So Baba Ramdev is a yoga guru.  What is it that he’s looking for, what does he expect to accomplish?

GALLAFENT: Well, he’s a guru, but he’s sort of one of THE gurus in India.  He has hundreds of thousands of devoted followers, and it’s important to understand something of the relationship between gurus and their disciples in India.  It’s just not something that we in the US can grasp that easily.  Yesterday I was talking with this globetrotting Economics professor at the Indian Institute of Management, somebody who’s really representative of the new India, and he has a guru, a different one, and he told me that, this is a quote, “The guru in India occupies first space.  He comes before your wife, he comes before your husband, he comes before your children.  He comes above everything else.”  So, people like Baba Ramdev, they hold absolutely enormous influence, and right now Baba Ramdev is focusing on official corruption, and specifically on what’s known here as “black money.”  That’s money stored in secret off-shore accounts without being taxed.

SCHACHTER: Alex, I just wonder if this a normal thing, for one of these gurus to get involved in politics like this.

GALLAFENT: Well, gurus in India generally do stand outside the political process, and the critics say if you’re going to make political points, join the political process.  Stand for election somewhere.  But actually, Baba Ramdev is a bit unusual in that he does have political aspirations.  He said that his group will put up candidates in future elections.  Now, whether or not a spiritual following would translate into votes is another matter.  The other complaint is that this kind of political theater, a mass hunger strike in the capital city, doesn’t really get to the heart of what needs to be done.  I spoke with a young lawyer today, Siddharth Narain, and he’s concerned that the idea of the fast oversimplifies not only the problem, but also any proposed solution.

SIDDHARTH NARAIN: It can’t be so simple as “Disable that black money, or I will fast, and people who are corrupt should be hanged.”  I mean, is that really…on one level it’s disturbing, I mean you don’t, you can’t be so simple, black and white.

GALLAFENT: In other words, how do you get black money back into the country?  Where does it go?  What are the processes that would make that happen?  And that level of detail hasn’t been present in Baba Ramdev’s public pronouncements so far.

SCHACHTER: Okay, The World’s Alex Gallafent in Bangalore, in Southern India.  Alex, thank you so much.

GALLAFENT: Thanks, Aaron.

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