New Delhi, Aug. 21: Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, spearheads of the ongoing anti-corruption “movement”, ratcheted up their scale and intensity by threatening to lay siege on the capital — Lutyens Delhi to be precise — from Monday and putting the country through an “unprecedented revolution” from August 31 if the Parliament does not pass their Jan Lokpal bill.

Today, they gave an open call to the activists to set upon the houses of all members of Parliament in central Delhi, stage sit-ins, chant Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn, “Raghupati Raghava, Raja Ram” and demand which bill they supported — the government’s Lokpal or the Jan Lokpal.

Indicating that the “movement” would acquire the magnitude of a civil disobedience struggle, Hazare declared late on Sunday evening that the Centre had two options — pass the Jan Lokpal or quit.

“From August 31, the country will witness an ‘andolan’ like never before in Independent India if the government does not enact the bill into law. There is no stopping the people because they have finally woken up. So, I warn the government to choose its path soon,” he said.

The government was apparently clutching at every straw. After Kejriwal said in his morning address that they were willing to speak to the government but it had refused to get back to them, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s principal trouble-shooter Kapil Sibal asked Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan to promptly despatch the state’s additional chief secretary secretary, Umesh Chandra Sarangi to speak to Hazare.

Swami Agnivesh, a member of Hazare’s crack team, said: “If the government wishes to speak to us, it should appoint a negotiator.”

Sarangi, a Marathi-speaking bureaucrat, had in the past prevailed on Hazare to call off his fasts in the Congress-NCP’s regime against “corrupt” ministers. Bhaiiyuji Maharaj, a young religious leader from Indore, was also pressed into service because he was supposed to have a “good rapport” with the religiously-inclined Hazare.

Sources in the Hazare camp maintained no “compromise formula” was brought up. It is learnt that while Agnivesh and Justice Santosh Hegde advocated a “give-and-take” line, Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan insisted that it was Jan Lokpal or nothing.

Later in the day, Agnivesh too played to the gallery, raised the bar and said, “The government has to create an atmosphere of trust by withdrawing its bill from Parliament and introduce Jan Lokpal bill.”