Gandhi evoked for all manner of causes

She lies on the sidewalk, fanned by supporters, surrounded by TV cameras, fasting to death to protest the displacement of some 35,000 peasant families by a major dam project.

He leads a march of Hindu nationalists across northern India to protest the government's "appeasement" of minorities, especially Muslims.

Their causes couldn't be more ideologically different. Medha Patkar is a left-leaning activist who has spent 20 years trying to prevent construction of India's largest dam project. L.K. Advani is a former Indian deputy prime minister who led a mob that tore down a 500-year-old mosque in 1992, an act that set off riots that killed thousands.

But their common technique of nonviolent protest - seen this week in a Delhi hunger strike and a protest march starting in the western state of Gujarat respectively - serves as a reminder that the trappings of the Gandhian freedom movement, and occasionally the spirit, are alive and well.

Even as India grows into a 21st-century power - striking nuclear deals with America and wooing the world's biggest corporations - the nation still is often judged against the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi, its colonial-era founding father. And if critics are often quick to point out where modern India falls short in that comparison, they might put some of the blame on Mr. Gandhi himself.

"The weakness of Gandhi was that he never thought of institutions," says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, director of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. "His interest was the condition of the conscience" and to establish a link between the individual conscience and the policies of society.

It is difficult for a nonviolent resistance movement to maintain momentum over time, Mr. Mehta says, particularly in a country like India that has established its own native systems of law and government. Nobody likes to fight against himself.

Yet since the mid-1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Committee to Save the Narmada) has fought an Olympian struggle against four state governments to halt the construction of dams along the Narmada River. The dam was intended to bring electricity and water to four states.

Andolan founder Medha Patkar, backed by celebrities such as novelist Arundhati Roy, have marched the length of the Narmada River and succeeded in forcing the government to focus on the plight of displaced farmers, many of them members of India's disadvantaged tribes. It was the Andolan's protests that forced the World Bank to withdraw support for the Narmada project, in part because of the human cost of displacement.

In 100-degree heat, Ms. Patkar began her eighth day of fasting on Wednesday, visited by former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who begged her to end her fast as her health deteriorated. Patkar says she will continue her strike until the government publishes its plan to rehabilitate displaced families in the Narmada region.

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