Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement that saw Indians rally in support has been named among the top 10 news stories in the world this year by <i>Time</i> magazine, which listed the Arab Spring and killing of Osama bin Laden as the top attention-grabbing headlines.
Time magazine compiled 54 wide-ranging lists of the top 10 happenings in 2011 in the field of politics, entertainment, business, sports and pop culture.
Among the ‘Top 10 World-News Stories’ is “Anna Hazare’s Hunger Fasts Rock India” with the magazine saying that “in a year with more than its share of protests worldwide, perhaps the most striking act of dissent took place in India, where the country’s ruling coalition took flak for a host of corruption cases implicating a number of leading politicians“.
Mr. Hazare’s “fasts — even the threat of them — triggered mass demonstrations of support across India’s major cities and heaped pressure on the government to create an independent ombudsman body capable of investigating the nation’s political elites — even the Prime Minister — and bringing the corrupt to justice”.
It said the mass support 74-year old Mr. Hazare commanded, particularly from India’s burgeoning middle class, is a “sign of the growing frustrations and aspirations of those in the world’s largest democracy”.
The top news stories of 2011 were the Arab Spring that spread to a number of countries and the killing of bin Laden in a covert US raid in Abbottabad, besides the famine in the Horn of Africa, fall of longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Europe’s financial crisis.
In a different category, Time magazine said the death of religious leader Sathya Sai Baba was among the top 10 ’Religion Stories’ of 2011.
