The crowd at Jantar Mantar roared approval. “We will initiate investigations, jail all of them, and seize their assets within six months if we come to power,” he added, prompting rapturous applause.
That was Kejriwal on 26 November, 2012—the day the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was formally launched. It marked the beginning of the meteoric rise of India’s most significant political disruptor in contemporary history.
And that journey came to a screeching halt on Saturday, as the AAP was dislodged from power in Delhi, the Union Territory it had ruled for a decade after sweeping two consecutive elections. Kejriwal himself lost from the New Delhi constituency to the BJP’s Parvesh Verma.
This will now put to the test the AAP’s much-vaunted claim that it is not wedded to any ideology except the “politics of work”.
Indeed, the party’s post-ideological approach, which Kejriwal, a former income tax officer, called ‘kaam ki rajneeti,’ combined with a blend of welfare and populism, worked wonders for the party during most of its 13 years in existence.
Also, notwithstanding Kejriwal’s disavowal of ideology-oriented politics, the AAP had a number of Left-aligned faces in its leadership. That included Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, Medha Patkar, and even tribal activist Soni Sori, who was battling charges of acting as a conduit of Maoists. Kumar Vishwas, the Right-leaning poet, was among Kejriwal’s closest lieutenants too.
Its very first electoral outing was a success, as the AAP ended the Congress’s 15-year rule in Delhi in the 2013 assembly elections, winning 28 seats in the 70-member House—just shy of a majority. Kejriwal himself defeated three-term Congress chief minister Sheila Dikshit in the New Delhi constituency. It was then that the country got a glimpse of Kejriwal, the politician.
The AAP accepted outside support from the Congress to form a government. Kejriwal justified the move by claiming that people in the 272 public meetings he addressed as part of the party’s “referendum” on the issue had endorsed the decision, which also received “74 percent” approval in a poll conducted via text messages and the web.
The decision-making process bore the hallmark of an idea—direct democracy—which Kejriwal had strongly championed as an anti-corruption crusader, the very cause that catapulted him into the national limelight in the summer of 2011. It was then that he engineered the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, with veteran social activist Anna Hazare as its face.
In August 2012, months before the AAP was formally launched, Kejriwal addressed a rally at Jantar Mantar, where he first revealed that the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement would take the electoral plunge, announcing that every decision of the yet-to-be-formed party would be the result of the people’s direct participation.
“There will be no high command sitting in an air-conditioned room to pick candidates. People will pick the candidates. Our manifesto will not be drafted in AC rooms. We will go to the people and listen to them. The structure of the party will not resemble that of other parties. We will make public the details of donations we receive, and our expenditure on campaigning, advertising, and helicopter rides will be made public too,” he said.
Kejriwal’s first stint as chief minister lasted just 49 days, as he stepped down, accusing the Congress of not supporting the Jan Lokpal Bill introduced in the Delhi Assembly. Within months, as the country headed toward the general elections, Kejriwal made the audacious—some would argue reckless—move of having the AAP contest in 434 seats.
Kejriwal himself entered the ring against the BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, in Varanasi. With a 20 percent vote share, the AAP chief finished as runner-up behind Modi, but the party’s other candidates were routed across the country.
Crestfallen, Kejriwal returned to the drawing board. He began holding jan sabhas across Delhi to apologise to the people for quitting just 49 days into his tenure, vowing not to repeat such a harakiri in the future.
The party also launched an extensive dialogue with a cross-section of Delhiites while drafting its manifesto for the assembly elections scheduled for February 2015, paving the way for the lifting of President’s Rule that had been imposed after Kejriwal’s resignation.
That, coupled with the subsidies in the power and water sectors announced during his 49 days in power, struck a chord with the people, resulting in an overwhelming mandate in the AAP’s favour. It won 67 seats in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, reducing the BJP to just three seats and obliterating the Congress.
However, cracks began to appear in the party’s internal workings, with accusations of Kejriwal’s “high-handed” and “autocratic” management style. This internal feud led to the dramatic expulsion of senior leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan. It was beginning to emerge that Kejriwal had come a long way from his days as an activist when he had vowed not to reduce the AAP into a one-man show.
Despite these setbacks, Kejriwal’s popularity soared, particularly among Delhi’s working-class and lower-middle-class voters, many of whom shifted their allegiance from the Congress to the AAP.
To be sure, the party’s foray in Punjab in 2017 was not successful, but it managed to emerge as the principal opposition party. The same year, the AAP also failed to wrest the control of the municipal bodies in Delhi. And in 2019, it lost all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, finishing third in as many as five.
Just when it seemed that the AAP’s dream run was over, Kejriwal reoriented his politics. Gone was the angry politician, always sporting a grimace and relentlessly gunning for PM Modi. In came the genial, smiling Kejriwal—the everyday man, ‘sabka beta sabka bhai’.
Kejriwal centered his 2020 assembly campaign around the AAP’s achievements in governance: the transformation of government schools, improvement in grassroots healthcare through the establishment of mohalla clinics, ensuring the poor could lead lives with dignity by making power and water consumption free up to a certain extent, and making bus travel free for women.
However, he turned his back when asked to take positions on civil liberties and minority rights. Instead, he organised a state-funded Lakshmi Puja in front of the grand Akshardham Temple, left no opportunity to publicly recite the Hanuman Chalisa, and launched free pilgrimage trips for senior citizens.
This shift in tone paid off. The 2020 elections returned the AAP to power with 62 seats, leaving the BJP with only eight and reducing Congress’s vote share to a paltry 4 percent. As he began his third term as chief minister, Kejriwal, who had clashed with the Centre multiple times by then, could not have anticipated the troubles ahead.
It notched up electoral successes though. First, it dislodged the Congress from power in Punjab in 2022, forming its second government in the country. It ended the year on a happy note too, winning a simple majority in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
However, even as the AAP celebrated its successes, a section of its leaders had their eyes set on the fast gathering dark clouds over the party.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had already named the then deputy CM Manishi Sisodia in the excise policy case as an accused and had started arresting some AAP faces—beginning with Vijay Nair, a businessman who was handling the party’s communications.
The AAP leadership, however, sought to keep the party’s morale high by investing its firepower in its electoral campaign in Gujarat, where it contested in 2023, winning five seats, and pocketing a vote share of 13 per cent.
Then came the unravelling. First, it was Sisodia’s turn. On 26 February 2023, the CBI came knocking on his door, and arrested him. Eight months later, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which had opened a separate probe into the case in August 2023.
With their petitions for bail facing rejections, the party was firmly in the grip of despondency. Nearly a year later, as India prepared to elect its next government, came the crippling blow, as Kejriwal was picked up by the ED from his official residence on 21 March, becoming the first sitting chief minister to be arrested in independent India.
There were other setbacks, too. The Centre brought an ordinance, which was later passed in Parliament, amending the Government of National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi Act, 1991. This effectively negated the May 11, 2023, Supreme Court judgment that had empowered the AAP government to make laws and wield control over the bureaucrats working with it.
Ultimately, the rise of AAP’s formidable governance model appeared to stall, with a sense of despondency taking hold within the party.
After walking out on bail in September last year, Kejriwal made efforts to regroup and revitalise the party. However, stringent bail conditions prevented him from effectively serving as chief minister—he couldn’t hold Cabinet meetings or sign files—hindering his ability to get governance back on track as anger mounted over broken roads and an inefficient garbage collection system.
It forced him to elevate Atishi to the post, but in the end, it proved too little, too late.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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