Portrait of a Rebel

As a young man, he took part in two wars as a member of the Indian army but his battle against corruption in the twilight of his life made him an icon.
That is the chequered journey of Kisan Baburao Hazare, popularly known as Anna (means brother) Hazare, whose hunger strike and the groundswell of support it generated forced the government to accept his demand for a new and tougher law against graft.
Born into a farmer' s family in Ralegan Siddhi, an obscure village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra state, on January 15, 1940, Hazare was brought up his childless aunt but financial constraints forced him to give up studies after class seven.
After the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the Indian government had made an appeal to the youth to join the defence services and Hazare was one of those who responded and joined the Army in 1963 as a truck driver.
During the 1965 India-Pakistan war, he was posted in the Khemkaran sector where Pakistani fighter jets bombarded Indian positions. Hazare had a lucky escape but he saw his colleagues die before him, leading to his decision to remain a bachelor. His mother died in 2002 and he has two married sisters.
During his days in the Army in the 1960s as a truck driver, he spent a lot of time reading about Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Acharya Vinoba Bhave who had spearheaded a movement for land reforms.
Hazare took voluntary retirement from the army in 1975 and returned to Ralegan Siddhi village which was then afflicted by drought, poverty, unemployment, crime and alcoholism.
He motivated the villagers to join him in building canals and bunds to store rainwater which helped solve water scarcity and increased irrigation potential. Literacy programmes were also taken up transforming the village into a model village. This experiment shot Hazare into limelight.
It was during that time that Hazare first came across a case of corruption by forest officers in Maharashtra and went on an indefinite hunger strike in Alandi near Pune. His agitation jolted the authorities into taking action against the erring officers.
He launched a campaign for the Right to Information in 1997 that resulted in the Maharashtra government legislating an Act which was subsequently adopted by the federal Indian government in 2005.
Sitting in a small house in his native village, Anna Hazare wears only khadi 'dhuti and panjabi' and has for long been the rallying point of civil society groups fighting against corruption in public life.
"Our fight must not end here," Hazare said, while thousands of supporters shouted "We are with you" and cheered him at the central Jantar Mantar landmark which the media dubbed "India's Tahrir Square", reports AFP.
"The real fight begins now," Hazare said.