Will campaign only for good men from AAP: Anna

Two days after he said he would campaign for any 'good' candidate fielded by former colleague Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Anna Hazare clarified that his support was exclusive to the rookie party. Priya Ranjan Sahu reports.

Two days after he said he would campaign for any “good” candidate fielded by former colleague Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Anna Hazare clarified that his support was exclusive to the rookie party.

“I will campaign only for good candidates put up by AAP, founded by Arvind Kejriwal, because in the past two years, I have seen that he has done nothing for himself and is completely devoted to the country, sacrificing a lot in the process,” Hazare told reporters in Bhubaneshwar on Saturday.

On Thursday, the 75-year-old anti-corruption campaigner had said, “I will crosscheck (the backgrounds of) those selected. If I find them good, I will support the candidates and campaign for them.”

Ending his three-day tour of Odisha, Hazare admitted on Saturday that there were many good people in established political parties too, but said he could not support them as the control of those parties lay elsewhere.

Accusing those parties of using unfair means to raise funds for elections, he said: “They collect crores from corporates and vested interest groups. Then they turn the black money white by breaking the amounts to less than Rs.20,000 each from supposed fictitious donors to conceal the identities of the real donors.”