With the ongoing protests on the Jan Lokpal issue gathering steam, Anna Hazare has been compared by some with Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Hazare has used fasting as a technique of agitation, the same as the Mahatma. He also projects a rural persona of simplicity. Experts, however, believe that the analogy is far- fetched, and say that apart from the use of khadi, the two are very different from one another. A well-known historian and scholar of the freedom movement, Prof.