Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal⁠— the man with a knack for Carpe Diem

• Arvind Kejriwal was called the giant killer as it dethroned the late Sheila Dikshit of Congress — the chief minister of Delhi for three consecutive terms then.
• Six years later, the muffler-wearing Arvind Kejriwal is ready to face the people’s verdict on his administration so far.
• AAP may win a comfortable majority of 59 seats of the total 70 in the Delhi assembly elections.
• A win in the upcoming Delhi elections of 2019 will raise his stature in India’s national politics.

When Arvind Kejriwal resigned from the office of the Chief Minister after the 49-day stint in 2013, the first thing he did was to walk up to his party office ⁠— in full media glare and commotion from his supporters ⁠— opened a creaky, old window on the first storey and blamed both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress for colluding with none other than India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire Chairman of Reliance Industries.

The imagery that Kejriwal relied on was starkly reminiscent of an iconic scene from a movie, Hey Ram, based on the life and times of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi.


In one stroke, Kejriwal had put Mukesh Ambani, the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, and the Congress leadership under Sonia Gandhi in one bucket and portrayed himself as ‘holier’ than all of them. It possibly struck a chord with the angry voters who were disillusioned by a system that had failed them inordinately.

His continued onslaught on Ambani was followed by defamation suits against media houses that gave Kejriwal airtime. However, Kejriwal’s persistence, which was later called persecution complex from some quarters, did give him a thumping victory in the Delhi assembly election that followed in 2015, when AAP won a whopping 67 of the 70 seats.