Anna Hazare with Kiran Bedi at Jantar Mantar on Sunday. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, March 25: Anna Hazare held a one-day fast against corruption today but the event’s theme appeared to have shifted from the Lokpal bill to the protection of whistleblowers.

“Twenty-five people (whistleblowers) are dead but this government has gone dumb and deaf. It is not listening to the cries of the people,” Hazare said at Jantar Mantar, watched by aides Arvind Kejriwal, Santosh Hegde, Shanti Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and others.

The apparent agenda change is being seen as a bid to tap into the growing public anger against the murders of whistleblowers, highlighted by the killing earlier this month of IPS officer Narendra Kumar in Madhya Pradesh after he took on the politically-connected mining mafia. It also comes days after an all-party meeting called by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh failed to reach a consensus on the Lokpal bill.

Hazare’s associates spoke about their pet theme, claiming cases could have been registered against 14 UPA ministers, including Sharad Pawar, S.M. Krishna and P. Chidambaram, if there was a strong Lokpal. But the tenor and the thrust of the speeches were the need for a strong whistleblowers’ bill.

Many of the families of the 25 people who died in recent years trying to expose corruption had been invited to the event and they spoke about their ordeal.

The widow of slain IPS officer Kumar, who gave birth to a child days after his murder, wasn’t present but his uncle and cousin were. Although they expressed full faith in the CBI, which is probing the murder, they declared support for the larger cause of Hazare. Team Anna wants the CBI to come under the Lokpal.

Another person who spoke at Hazare’s gathering was Ashrita Mehta, whose husband Lalit was killed in Jharkhand in 2008 after he blew the lid on irregularities in government schemes.

“He was strangulated with his own belt and his face smashed beyond recognition. The police said he was killed by robbers We had started an NGO to conduct audits of government schemes. That’s when he discovered the irregularities,” she said.

Kejriwal echoed Ashrita. “Manjunath (Indian Oil’s Shanmugam Manjunath) had raised the issue of adulteration (in 2005)... he is no more, the adulteration is continuing.… Narendra Kumar is no more. They had asked the government for protection but they were not provided protection. In the Jan Lokpal bill that we want, there is a provision for protecting whistleblowers,” Kejriwal said.

Kumar Vishwas, another Team Anna member, dared ministers to send their children to the streets to fight corruption. “Many young whistleblowers have lost their lives fighting corruption. If ministers have the guts, send your young children to fight corruption in this scenario. You talk about sitting till midnight to pass the Lokpal bill. Don’t do us any favour. Our soldiers work overtime in the Siachen glacier to secure the country.”

Between the speeches, clips on the life of the whistleblowers were played on screens. Patriotic songs by Hazare’s supporters served as interludes. A large picture of Hazare along with those of the 25 “martyred” whistleblowers had been put up on the dais.

But it was the diminutive, almost-shy Jasuben who appeared to have tugged at the heart strings the most. Jasuben’s husband Vishram Laxman Dodiya, a bookseller in Surat, was hacked to death in 2010 after he took on a power company for giving a neighbour a connection on fake documents.

“For over 10 years we have been living without electricity because my husband had the courage to take on a big power company. The men who killed my husband roam free, the case has been forgotten, but our lives have stopped. I stitch clothes and my son pulls a rickshaw,” said the woman in her late thirties.

As she spoke, she was seen hugging a sobbing Sughuna, a homemaker in her early thirties whose husband was killed for fighting corruption in a scheme to improve drainage in their Andhra village.