Chasms Of Middle Earth

The unscripted reign of the commons’ king and the crossroads he stares at.

- Ajaz Ashraf

IT is September 2013 and the rickety WagonR begins its slow ascent up the Barapullah flyover in Delhi. In the front passenger seat is Arvind Kejriwal, who is citing the Aam Aadmi Party’s survey to scoff at those who have predicted a distant third spot for his party in the Delhi Assembly elections of December 4. “The Aam Aadmi Party will form Delhi’s next government,” Kejriwal says. The car grumbles as it negotiates the incline, as if to mock his certitude.

Just as the WagonR can’t trump an SUV, so it was assumed that AAP couldn’t beat the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. A national daily’s bureau chief predicted AAP would not get a seat; another thought it was just a middle-class phenomenon; a correspondent of a Japanese news agency did not mention Kejriwal in his curtain raiser on the election until he was asked to by his bosses in Tokyo.

AAP stunned all to pick up 28 seats. If the defining trait of all icons is to achieve what is deemed impossible through original methods, in 2013, Kejriwal took on the rulers, spoke against crony capitalism, and made people wonder whether India’s was a democracy or psephocracy, all in his own original aam aadmi avatar. His politics was predicated on reviving the original concept of the Indian state—that it can’t abdicate its social responsibility.

The sheet he was singing from was not radically different from that of others. Yet Delhiites believed him. He had entered politics to serve the people, they said, for money he could as well have made as an income tax officer. And it helped a great deal to be the untainted outsider—no political pedigree to speak of, no notorious history and a brand new party to start with. He was, so to speak, like the common people—an “insignificant man”.