Peoples who need heroes, as we know, are not lucky. Not even the Indians escape the rule, who in recent weeks have found a new symbol of good against evil in Anna Hazare, a 74-year-old Gandhian-inspired political activist who has been protesting rampant corruption in the country since last April by going on hunger strike.
At the center of the dispute with the government is his request to approve, in full, a law that should cure the most serious cancer from which the country is afflicted: that is, the swirling circle of large and small bribes that govern Indian public life , from the assignment of telephone licenses worth billions of dollars to that of ration cards that should be provided free of charge to the neediest in order to buy flour and lentils.
But the executive is not willing to accept turnkey bills and has placed a series of conditions on the demonstrations organized by Hazare. Which in turn is not there to organize protests tailored to the government and ended up in prison. The result? Arrests, frustration, paralysis. In a word: stalemate.
And it's a pity. Because in India today there is perhaps no more topical debate than the one on corruption. The price paid by the country is very high, not only in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of human lives. People die of bribes, paid or not, in India: from hunger, from disease and from the damage caused to society by bad politics that draws its lifeblood from dirty money.
And it is also a pity because, even if he were lucky enough to live another 100 years, Hazare would never again be able to deal with a cleaner prime minister than Manmohan Singh, a distinguished economist repeatedly lent to the institutions, but completely devoid of all that baggage of mischief necessary to navigate the muddy waters of Indian politics.
Why then do the two not understand each other? Partly because of Hazare and partly because of Singh.
Hazare is unwilling to dilute his bill, not caring that if it were implemented to the letter it would create an institutional monster. A democracy - and not just any, but the largest on the planet - placed at the mercy of an anti-corruption body created by good people, but almost omnipotent, capable of trampling on the prerogatives of any other institutional body, including the Supreme Court.
Singh, although personally clean, after 7 years of premiership spent sacrificing himself on the altar of coalition politics, his dust is wet. To slowly push the country forward on the path of reforms, he has had to sit down at the table with an exorbitant number of ministers and political leaders with whom in private life he would be careful not to share even just a sidewalk.
It is not difficult to imagine that the idealistic, naive and ultimately potentially dangerous maximalism of Hazare badly accords with the real politik of those who for years have been measuring in minute steps with the nauseating compromise policy necessary to govern a complex country like India .
But precisely for this reason, despite knowing the moral dwarfism of a large part of the Indian political class, it is difficult to openly side with the demonstrators. It doesn't matter how good their intentions are and how lofty their ideals are (and the former are great and the latter couldn't be more noble). Their attempt to bypass the tortuous roads through which a democracy grows and takes shape is fraught with dangers which, in a season of rejection of politics and its many deviations, are difficult to see, but they are there.
Hazare's extraordinary battle to date has been institutionally reckless, but morally just. Now the best thing to do is to take the extraordinary baggage of authority and popularity accumulated in recent months and put it at the service of a process - slow perhaps, certainly imperfect, but not blackmailing - for the growth of Indian society.
