IT is a feature of our times that many a good intention has turned into a right-wing menace, and Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign galvanising swaths of urban India in recent days is a prime example.

The problem is pervasive. You look behind the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia only to discover the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists poised to hijack the agenda. You try to justify Muammar Qadhafi’s violent exit from Tripoli and you will find the chiefs of his torture chambers spearheading the rebel campaign to topple him. Want to get rid of Assad in Syria?

Prepare to receive his opponents with a menacing radical religious agenda.

An instructive instance of sound intentions getting subverted in connivance with history came in the late 1970s in Iran, where liberal enthusiasts joined and led a spectacular campaign to overthrow a corrupt US-backed monarch.

Though they succeeded they were quickly upstaged by an obscurantist religious clique, which decimated the left and exiled the liberals, believe it or not, with Washington’s support. The revived Tehran-Washington bonhomie blossomed briefly during the Iran-Contra affair.

The 1970s saw the rise and fall of hope in Islamabad where the Pakistan National Alliance sought to tame Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s autocratic rule but mutated into an Islamic revivalist movement to save the reasonably liberal country. Ziaul Haq became the self-styled saviour. (The virus mutated again into a lawyers’ movement recently to throw out another military dictator. Many of the lawyers who led the campaign for democracy showered rose petals on the fanatic who killed Salmaan Taseer.)

At about the same time in the 1970s a mass movement gained momentum in India against Indira Gandhi. Here too a range of liberals and leftists (except communists aligned with Moscow) threw in their lot with Jayaprakash Narayan, a West-backed father figure who rose to challenge the Congress party’s penchant for the Nehru-Gandhi dynastic rule. The movement was hijacked by religious interlopers of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh denominations.

The most potent of these infiltrators was the neo-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded in the 1920s as a club of disgruntled Maharashtrian Brahmins peeved at Gandhi’s rise as a pacifist nationalist leader the RSS evolved as a broad-based Indian clone of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Though it started out as a petit bourgeois outfit spewing hatred against India’s Christians and Muslims, it was soon eyed as a powerful communal insurance against the secular volatility that stalked the country.

Like the Nazis who began by fighting for Germany’s mythical golden past and spawned a culture of hate against imagined foes, the RSS nursed grievances against Mughal rule and other make-believe fall guys to conjure up images of perpetually wronged Hindus, never mind that ‘Hindu’ came into vogue as a word in mediaeval Iran as a way of describing darker-skinned Indians.

The sum and substance of it all is that powerful Indian tycoons, including the Ambanis and the Tatas, are projecting a key RSS activist from Gujarat as a feasible future leader of India.

The biggest giveaway of Anna Hazare’s ideological preference for the Hindu right lies not so much in the RSS-style palm-down salute he has been shown taking on television but in his praise of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the business-backed RSS leader. Even so, Hazare’s prescriptions against corruption are not unique. They were first published in a 2007 World Bank study for sub-Saharan African states. Right-wing supporters of his fast can take heart from the fact that an uncorrupt economy will not necessarily lead to greater democracy. Look at Singapore.

It is equally noteworthy that the agitation Hazare leads detracts from and does not focus on recent corporate scandals.

Government ministers and business executives have been landing in jail, a rare occurrence in India.

For slightly over two decades, India’s corporate media have flirted with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, projecting the former bureaucrat and economics teacher as a crusader against chronic poverty and stifling state controls over business.

My Pakistani colleague (and fabulous host at the idyllic English countryside resort of Devizes) Irfan Husain wrote last week how I hold Manmohan Singh responsible for much of the corruption dogging India. What I forgot to share with Irfan — over an outstanding rabbit stew he cooked and over several meals that included succulent steaks and oven-grilled trout — that I see in Dr Singh’s rule shades of the Weimar Republic.

Why do I find Dr Singh less than transparent as opposed to the praises for integrity heaped on him by an ever-fawning media?

One, it was to save Dr Singh’s policies when he was finance minister that MPs were bribed in a trust vote, which he would have lost. MPs were again bribed when he was prime minister to similarly bail him out. In the first case, the MPs were jailed but not the bribe-givers.

Two, Dr Singh used a bureaucratic loophole to assert he was a resident of the remote tribal state of Assam. This is hardly what a man of integrity would claim. But it was a requirement if he was to be elected to the Rajya Sabha from that state. The law has since been redefined under his initiative and now any citizen of a certain age can contest from any state to the Rajya Sabha subverting the federal character the constitution had envisaged for the upper house.

Dr Singh holds the distinction of being the third longest-serving prime minister without ever becoming a member of the Lok Sabha. Ergo: he never won a popular poll mandatory for a prime minister even in Pakistan.

Corruption was always around in the corridors of power in India. But ministers would resign when found culpable. Dr Singh has not remained unsinged by the recent spate of graft charges against his cabinet colleagues though he has denied personal responsibility. Now a former minister jailed for corruption has threatened to summon him as witness.

There was something rotten about the state of Denmark as the Bard said, and also in the Weimar Republic as history tells us.

But the stench hanging over India is not about trillions of rupees salted away in foreign banks by an alliance of businessmen and politicians. It is about perpetuating an inequitable system by parliamentary democracy if feasible, or by fascism if necessary. Anna Hazare looks primed to support both.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.