Amit Khanna: tall, fair, an executive at Virtusa, a Boston based firm in Hyderabad.

Vinod Bodhankar: kurta-clad business consultant who runs a meditation centre.

Chandrasekhar Ponda: middle-aged, plump, vice-president of a software company.

Ashok Rode: quiet, inconspicuous, an art of living teacher.

Sachin Thorat: dark, uneducated, a slum-dweller.

What’s common among these men? They are working shoulder to shoulder from a two-room makeshift office at Pune’s Patil Plaza. They are Arun Bhatia’s five-man army.

Remember Arun Bhatia — the “demolition man” who pulled down a string of buildings in a construction fraud in Mumbai in 1985? This is also the same Bhatia IAS who was transferred 27 times in his 30-year career.

Amit Khanna chanced upon Bhatia — and learnt about his standing for election from Pune — while reading an article about him on the Net in his office in Hyderabad. Khanna, who is principal software architect at Virtusa, took a month’s leave, flew down to Pune and has been campaigning for Bhatia ever since.

The core group of men and women fighting Bhatia’s battle are people who have voluntarily burst out of the cocoon — comfortable in most cases — of their existence in the belief that this is their chance to fight against corruption.

“I was busy with my work when a leaflet announcing Bhatia’s candidature landed in my drawing room,” says Vinod Bodhankar, a Reiki grandmaster. “I just knew this was my chance at effecting change. I had to support this man. He didn’t know me then. But it hardly mattered.”

What started as a trickle with about 10 people like Khanna and Bodhankar has now swelled to a band of 2,000 — retired professors, foreign-educated technocrats, IIM graduates, middle-class men with a stable job and family and slum-dwellers like Sachin Thorat. With a missionary zeal, they are spreading the message — fight corruption — going door to door, using fax, e-mail, telephone, word of mouth, anything.

Hemant Patil, an earnest young man who runs the Bhrashtachar Virodhi Samiti, or Committee against Corruption, didn’t need an invitation from Bhatia. “On rare occasions do men like Bhatia deign to fight elections. All I have wanted to do was bring some respectability and honour to people’s life — in the villages that I walk through each day, in the brothels that I visit, in the slums that I sometimes live in. Now that we have a man who can represent us in Parliament, we should not back off.”

They are the Sancho Panzas to Arun Bhatia’s Don Quixote. And they believe they can win, even against rivals like the Congress’ Suresh Kalmadi, the former Union minister who has a foot on every sports field, and sitting BJP member Pradeep Rawat.

Both sides have large contingents of dedicated cadre to conduct their campaigning. Don Quixote and Sancho look pathetic figures charging at these mighty armies. Kalmadi and Rawat barely acknowledge Bhatia as a rival.

Not so the middle-class man in Pune, whose wife travels in an auto-rickshaw to fetch their children from Sainik School. “My daughter Shalini is a graduate from Symbiosis and has heard about Bhatiaji. She is very impressed with his integrity and the honesty he has shown throughout his career. She will vote for him and so will we,” says Sudhakar Gaitonde at Koregaon Park as his wife Amrita smiles in agreement.

Reassuring as that would be for Bhatia, this contest is hardly about tilting at windmills.

“I got a few nasty calls before I filed my nomination,” Bhatia says, pointing to the armed guard who now shadows him. “My cadre are not political workers. They are students, businessmen, professionals, retired teachers and bureaucrats. When they campaigning for me they bring their own tiffin. They know I don’t have money to throw around. If people understand what I am promising them, I think I will come through.”

Back at the so-called election office, a woman calls up Bodhankar and says: “Please take my Maruti car for seven days. I will also pay for the petrol. Don’t say no. I am sending the car right now.”

Chandrasekhar Ponda, who keeps the accounts, looks flummoxed. “How will I show that in the account books?” No one around has an answer. “We have to fit it in somewhere,” shouts Khanna from the other room, “and if they call up, please tell the group of students who came here yesterday to take back the pocket money they left.”