Quotes of the Day

After 10 days of subsisting on nothing but water, the Indian anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare said on Thursday evening he was ready to end his fast on the condition that the Indian government would promise, in writing, to include the main points of his agenda in its final draft of a new anti-corruption bill. "I have sent a message to the prime minister," Hazare told thousands of supporters in New Delhi on Thursday evening. "If you want to pass the Jan Lokpal (people's ombudsman) bill then start the discussion Friday morning. I have three demands. If there is support, then I can consider ending the fast." (The debate in Parliament will take place on Saturday with Hazare's fast now entering the twelfth day.)

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed to have gotten the message. He met with Rahul Gandhi, acting head of the Congress Party, on Friday morning. (His mother, Sonia Gandhi, is abroad getting treatment for an undisclosed illness.) Shortly after his meeting with the Prime Minister, Gandhi stepped into the debate, ending a conspicuous silence during this week-long crisis of confidence in his party's government. He thanked Hazare for bringing the issue of corruption to national attention but then questioned whether one law would make a difference. "Witnessing the events of the last few days it would appear that the enactment of a single Bill will usher in a corruption-free society," Gandhi said. "I have serious doubts about this belief."

Until now, the government has appeared confused about whether to take a hard line against Hazare for disrupting the parliamentary process or try to co-opt his demands, adopting them as their own. At one point, a Congress Party spokesman accused Hazare himself of being corrupt. The government also held a series of meetings with Hazare's group this week and an all-party meeting — none of which came to any conclusion. Meanwhile, the government has watched the 74-year-old's failing health and growing public support with alarm. On Thursday, Singh made an emotional appeal to Hazare to call off his fast. "He [Hazare] has become the embodiment of our people's disgust and concern about tackling corruption," he said. "I applaud him, I salute him."

Rahul Gandhi's entry onto the stage in this drama offers a little clarity. Few Congress Party politicians are willing to openly contradict Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family and a likely future prime minister. Gandhi has now made his position public, so it's likely that the government will follow his lead: praise Hazare and empathize with anti-corruption sentiment but insist on the primacy of Parliament. Instead of a completely independent Lokpal, Gandhi proposed an office that would be "accountable to Parliament like the Election Commission" and suggested other reforms, like government funding of elections and reforms to end tax evasion.

This approach — more debate, more laws and more regulation — may not satisfy the thousands of people who see in Hazare's fight their own daily struggles against petty bureaucratic corruption. Kesar Bai, 60, a widow from a remote village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, said she fasted outside a government office for a month to get her dead husband's pension benefits, which had been denied to her for the last 3 years. She says that she also had to bribe the clerk Rs. 500 ($11) to open an account with the government's flagship rural employment scheme. On Thursday she came down to Delhi along with 500 other people to see Hazare. "When I was fasting there was no one around me," she says. "He must be a very important man. I will ask him to get my pension out."

Gopal, a yoga teacher from Hrishikesh, came to Delhi to join the protest, complaining that he had to pay a bribe to get his passport. Hari Singh, a small trader from Lucknow, took a few days off from work to register his anger at having to pay a bribe to a government clerk to ensure that his wife, a teacher in a government school, gets paid every month. "I don't care about college, this much I can sacrifice for the man who is doing so much for the country," says Pradip Ghosh, an engineering student from Kolkata. "I started a fast at home but my mother put a stop to it. So, I decided to come here and fast along with him."

Although they had little knowledge of the details of Hazare's Jan Lokpal bill, they are confident that if it is passed, corruption will be rooted out. That unquestioning faith in the Lokpal has stirred up a lot of skepticism among academics and experts on Indian government. Says Avani Kapur, senior researcher with a New Delhi-based think tank, the Center for Policy Research, "One anti-corruption bill cannot eradicate corruption overnight."

They have been joined by other social activists who have criticized Hazare's undemocratic arm-twisting of Parliament. Tushar Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi's grandson, rejected comparisons of Hazare's fast to that of the Mahatma. Instead of trying to "reform an adversary into a friend," Gandhi told the Times of India, "Anna's fast is against an enemy. It is like a me versus you kind of thing." Activist and author Arundhati Roy wrote in The Hindu newspaper that Hazare's Jan Lokpal is "a draconian, anti-corruption law" that would just add another unaccountable bureaucracy to the existing one — "two oligarchies instead of one."

The cynicism of Delhi's chattering classes has been fueled by frenzied coverage of Hazare's hunger strike by India's populist television news channels. While Hazare's supporters waited in queues stretching for 300 meters to gain entry to the protest ground, there is a special door at the rear of the venue reserved for the media. Inside the grounds, almost every inch is taken up by makeshift platforms for India's major television channels. Small crowds gather around these platforms, with people falling over each other to shout slogans into the camera and obligingly doing retakes on demand. The cameras zoom in on the small groups, giving the impression of a larger, more passionate crowd. Spotting a notebook, people eagerly approached a TIME reporter and offered interviews, although they were visibly disappointed on learning they would not be on television. A girl of about 13, accompanied by her father was overheard asking a television crew, "Can I please give a (sound)byte?"

Appropriately, the protest fast is being held at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan, site of an annual re-enactment of the story of the god Ram, hero of the Hindu epic the Ramayana and considered a model of leadership. An auto rickshaw driver, Kripa Shahu, who was exasperated at the roadblocks around the Ramlila ground, says, "After all this tamasha (drama) has ended, Hazare will walk away with his own glory, everyone will walk away with something, will we the common man walk away with anything?" So far, only one constituency has gotten exactly what they wanted; ratings for television news channels are way up.

• Nilanjana Bhowmick and Jyoti Thottam / New Delhi
• Rahul Gandhi, scion of country's most powerful political family, praised Anna Hazare for taking a stand on corruption, but said the 74-year-old's hunger strike sets a bad precedent.