Anna Hazare’s 2011 Movement: How the Lokpal Law Took Shape

The Administrative Reforms Commission recommended a Lokpal and state Lokayuktas in 1966, and a bill passed the Lok Sabha in 1969. Then the idea stalled. Bills were introduced in 1971, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2008, and every one lapsed or was withdrawn, often because the Lok Sabha was dissolved before the Rajya Sabha acted. Some states moved first: Maharashtra set up a Lokayukta in 1972.

What changed in 2011 was public pressure. The campaign’s argument was simple: governments would not create a strong watchdog over themselves unless forced to. The movement got the law passed in a little over two and a half years. But the Act’s own selection rules, and a Lok Sabha without a recognised Leader of Opposition, meant the first Lokpal was appointed only on 19 March 2019, more than five years after the law came into force.

Hazare, then 73, was a veteran of fasts in Maharashtra, where his campaigns had preceded the state’s Right to Information Act in 2003. His Jantar Mantar fast from 5 April 2011 lasted about 98 hours. Vigils and candle marches spread across cities, and on 9 April the government notified a Joint Drafting Committee chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, with Shanti Bhushan as co-chair.

The committee met from 16 April and broke down on 21 June with two drafts. When the Cabinet approved its own, narrower bill on 28 July, Hazare announced a second fast. His arrest on the morning of 16 August turned it into the movement’s biggest moment: he refused to leave Tihar Jail for three days, then fasted at Ramlila Maidan from 19 August before crowds of tens of thousands. On 27 August both Houses debated the Lokpal and agreed a Sense of the House on three of his demands, and he broke his fast the next morning. Hazare’s campaign was one of several in Indian history in which public mobilisation pushed Parliament; the JP movement of the 1970s is the comparison most often made.

The government’s position was that the Selection Committee could not function without a Leader of Opposition, and it introduced an amendment to let the leader of the largest opposition party take that seat. The amendment never passed. In Common Cause v. Union of India on 27 April 2017, the Supreme Court held the Act was workable as it stood. Even then, the search committee was set up only in September 2018, and the Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge declined to attend selection meetings as a special invitee without a vote. The same tension over who sits on selection panels runs through India’s other institutional debates, such as the fight over judicial appointments.

After the poorly attended fast of July–August 2012, the movement’s leaders disagreed over whether to contest elections. Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Prashant Bhushan and others chose politics. Kejriwal announced the plan on 2 October 2012, and the Aam Aadmi Party was launched at Jantar Mantar on 26 November 2012. Hazare, Kiran Bedi and Justice Santosh Hegde stayed out, and Hazare asked the party not to use his name or image. Kiran Bedi later joined the BJP.

AAP’s rise was rapid: it formed a minority government in Delhi in December 2013, and Kejriwal resigned in February 2014 when the Delhi Assembly blocked his Jan Lokpal Bill. The party’s later battles with the Centre over Delhi’s powers are covered in our Delhi vs Centre services timeline. The two developments should be read separately: India Against Corruption was the civil-society campaign; AAP was a party launched by a section of its activists.

The figures come from a written reply by Minister of State Jitendra Singh in the Lok Sabha on 25 March 2026, as reported by PTI; one report of the same reply gives 16 rather than 161 disposals for 2023–24. Disposal can include closure, a direction for preliminary inquiry or investigation, or a finding that the complaint fell outside the Lokpal’s jurisdiction. Better measures of performance would be inquiries completed, prosecutions sanctioned, cases filed and court outcomes, which these figures do not show.

The institution’s first seven years have been marked as much by gaps and disputes as by cases. The Chairperson’s post had no full-time holder from May 2022 to March 2024. In January 2025 the Lokpal’s view that it could examine complaints against High Court judges was stayed by the Supreme Court within a month. Its decision to sanction a CBI chargesheet against Trinamool MP Mahua Moitra was set aside by the Delhi High Court in December 2025, and the scope of its sanction powers is now before the Supreme Court. The BMW tender of October 2025, cancelled after criticism, became a symbol for critics of how far the institution had drifted from the austerity of the 2011 campaign.