Anna Hazare: Critics raise voice against movement's intolerance & coercive, bizarre methods on social network

NEW DELHI: While the Anna Hazare campaign has effectively used the social media to co-ordinate protests and amplify its message, a growing section of voices on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been railing against the method, motives and consequences of the Jan Lokpal campaign.

Complaints range from an opposition to the campaign's claim of representing the "people of the nation" to coercive methods reportedly used by activists in some parts of the country to inflate the number protesters, to disenchantment with the breathless coverage on television that has the effect of exaggerating the actual number of people at a protest and its intensity.

Blogger Nitin Pai has been a vocal critic of Hazare's 'fast unto death' proposition, arguing that such fasts had no place in a democracy and amounted to blackmail. He cites BR Ambedkar's famous 'grammar of anarchy' speech, in which the Dalit icon criticised Gandhi for using such fasts as tools of political dissent.

"We already have a Lokpal. It's called CBI. We slept as it was being undermined & reduced to a political tool. Why would we wake for Lokpal?" Pai posted on Twitter. Tushar Gandhi, great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, quoted the latter on Twitter: "A satyagrahi exhausts all other avenues before he resorts to Satyagraha," MK Gandhi, Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, P 10," he tweeted. Many felt tone of Anna's associates and the campaign's spokespeople was needlessly aggressive.