News Piece - Anna Hazare

     Anna Hazare, is the face of India’s fight against corruption. He has taken this fight from a mere local level and given it the importance that it demands. He has challenged the highest orders of power in his hope to form a country dominated by truth and compassion. Not only does he garner support from common folk but from intelligentsia as well. Among many of the previous battles he has fought, the Anti-Corruption Bill, or the Jan Lokpal Bill, is his latest.

   It is important to point out some of Hazare’s previous projects. He is the pioneer of the Watershed Development revolution that spread across India, as well as the Movement to pass the Right to Information Act. However, it is through the Model Village Project that Hazare feels that he has succeeded. His fight against Corruption was an inevitable one. Constantly in a situation where, he has had to face corrupt Government officials, he finally brought this to the notice of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. He was forced to do this right after he began his, Model Village Project in Maharashtra because of the amount of corruption he had to bear during his struggle.

  He fought first against corruption that was blocking growth in rural India. His organization was the Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Andolan (People's movement against Corruption). His tool of protest -hunger strikes. And his prime target - politicians. When he asked for the setting up of an inquiry, due to the great public support, the Chief Minister conceded. When Anna Hazare was charged with ‘defamation’ he readily went to jail. This act reminded the people of India of Gandhi’s actions, only to strengthen their resolve. He was eventually released, because the government did not want to anger the public. Later, two other officials were found guilty of corruption, and were promptly removed. While others would consider this a victory and believe that the fight was over, Hazare thought differently. He believed that by attacking merely two officials, corruption could not be eradicated. Putting great pressure on the Government by fasting for four days- to pass the Jan Lokpal Bill which has failed to pass for 42 years- he finally emerged victorious when the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, stated that the Bill would be introduced once again in the Monsoon Session of the Parliament.

    Gandhi and Vivekananda as his influences, it is inevitable that Anna Hazare’s goal in life is to ‘serve fellow human being.’ Having served in the Indian Army for a while, his fight is undying, yet mostly harmless and nonviolent. Despite his methods being termed as ‘blackmail’ by politicians, Hazare, from Maharashtra, never hopes to give up fight against evils of modern human society.

-Subhalakshmi Gooptu

News Piece - Wikileaks

Since the launch of Wikileaks, there has been an explosion of classified information being opened up to the public for scrutiny and critique. Much to the dismay of governments of various countries, Wikileaks was launched on 4^th October, 2006 claiming that its database had a collection of top secret articles which were not accessible for the general public. With Julian Assange as the director, Wikileaks based in Sweden, claimed to have been founded by ‘founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.’

Calling it ‘Scientific Journalism,’ Assange points out that the Wikileaks initiates an era when journalism will not necessarily need a to depend on journalists’ interpretation of news by publishing documents directly on the internet allowing them to come to their own conclusions. In April 2010, Wikileaks published footage from the 2007 Baghdad airstrike and then releasing in the same year Afghan War Diary, consisting of thousands of documents about the war. With the release of U.S. diplomacy cables in November, Wikileaks fell into great criticism and legal battle.

Wikileaks received a number of awards applauding its regeneration of the ‘freedom of speech’ of the individual as opposed to the power of a government. However, it also faced a large amount of flak, initially from the U.S. government and now from others such as India, for exposing documents which may apparently lead to a misbalance of ‘international diplomacy.’ Closer to home, the exposure of documents and videos concerning the Indian government and the prevalent corruption and ineffectiveness, has also led to the censure of the website by the Government, especially from the Congress.

Despite the presence of laws with press protections clauses, Julian Assange has been accused by the U.S. under the Espionage Act of stealing documents from the government and is also facing a criminal probe. Assange continues to fight the legal battle and at the same time, managed to raise funds for the website, with great support from the general public.

-Subhalakshmi Gooptu