Prominent Team Anna members will not be present at its core committee meeting being held in Ghaziabad tomorrow at a time when the grouping is beset with internal contradictions and facing embarrassing disclosures relating to financial impropriety. While Anna Hazare himself is on a maun vrat in native village Ralegan Siddhi,Justice Santosh Hegde and Medha Patkar today said they would not be attending. Patkar said she had a prior engagement outside Delhi. Rajendra Singh and P V Rajagopal had earlier quit the core panel citing increasing politicisation of the group. Indicating that the meeting would be stormy,a close associate of Hazare,Kumar Vishwas,today set the tone by calling for a complete overhaul of the committee. In a letter to Hazare,Vishwas wrote that the 22-member limited core committee was too small. It must be disbanded and made a hard-core committee of 121 crore people,he said. I request you to suspend the current core committee and create a new system which can fulfill our dream of a corruption-free India, he wrote in his letter. He said the personal attacks being made against members of Team Anna were proof that the corrupt had ganged up to weaken the peoples movement. Patkar supported the idea of an overhaul of the group and said tomorrows meeting must discuss ways to take the movement forward. However,the activist played down differences within the members,who had come together on an anti-corruption platform.
