In April, Anna Hazare, a septuagenarian social activist who was once an army driver, left his village in Maharashtra State, came to Delhi and announced a fast-unto-death to demand that the government create an autonomous anti-corruption institution that would have the powers to investigate and prosecute anybody.

At the time, the government was embroiled in political scandals and public ire against politicians was particularly high.

When the news media began to transmit images of this austere old man sitting on a stage, wearing the formal whites of rural Maharashtra and threatening to die of starvation, the Indian middle class erupted in support. The anti-corruption movement suddenly became a joyous carnival.

The government yielded and agreed to form a committee of ministers and members of the anti-corruption movement chosen by Mr. Hazare. Mr. Hazare drank a liquid refreshment given to him by a little girl and ended his fast. But the committee could not agree on the legislation that would give birth to the anti-corruption body. Mr. Hazare wants the prime minister and the judiciary to be included in its ambit. The government does not want the body to be that far-reaching and has accused civic leaders of using the news media to twist the arm of a government elected by the people (precisely why the urban middle class loves Mr. Hazare).

Mr. Hazare has threatened to go on another fast-unto-death next month if his demands are not met. So pumped is he these days that he has started referring to himself in the third person: “Anna will face the bullets. Anna is not afraid of the government.” In India, usually only aging film stars refer to themselves in the third person.

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If the government is unable to deter Mr. Hazare from his death fast, one of the greatest battles of modern India will begin on Aug. 16 — the government elected largely by the poor versus the icon of the middle class on whom advertisers spend millions in the breaks between news reports.

Prashant Bhushan, a tireless civil liberties lawyer at the core of the anti-corruption movement, and a close confidant of Mr. Hazare — and one of the few Indians in recent times to address the public in just shirt and trousers — told me: “India is a top-down nation. Corruption comes from the very top and seeps into every aspect of the society.”

It is a view that has endeared itself to the middle class — that politicians are the fountainhead of corruption and not merely products of a corrupt society that rates practicality over values.

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The rise of the anti-corruption movement in India is also the rise of the nonpolitical leftists. That is, those who are not formally aligned with any political party but have overt socialist tendencies.

Mr. Bhushan, for instance, does not hide his contempt for capitalism and consumerism. He told me in an earlier interview that while nobody could deny that there was corruption in India before the economy was liberalized, the speed of privatization had “increased the demand for corruption.” He would like to stall many of the economic changes that India has pursued in the last 20 years.

The anti-corruption campaigners find support in the middle class right now because they are credited with “good intentions.” But India is the proof that there is nothing more dangerous than the good intentions of leftists. In fact, that is how they first destroyed the nation — through nearly five decades of good intentions, which included central planning, a closed economy and protection of Indian companies from foreign competition.

In time, as Mr. Hazare and friends escalate their war and begin to challenge India’s economic policies, it is possible that a day will come when a band of middle-class boys will sit together and say with anger and sorrow, “There are no prospects in this country.”

Which is exactly what their fathers used to say.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men.”