Rise & Fall of Kejriwal: A Sordid Saga of Deceit

When a much-idolised ideologue, gleaming with the glory of idealism, sheds his skin to reveal the lurking charlatan within, it's not just his fall from grace. It's also the failure of those who believed in him. Befooled by their own naiveté, they have nobody to blame but their own ideas of revolutionary idealism.

- Shazia Ilmi

This rise and fall of Arvind Kejriwal is a sordid saga of deception and deceit.

It all began in 2011 for me when I saw a bunch of folks show up in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, rallying for a Lokpal, i.e., an ombudsman and a law which will contain the rampant corruption and punish the corrupt. The audacity of the idea was alluring indeed, and there were others as gullible as me who took the foolhardy plunge into the India Against Corruption movement. As an architect of the Anna movement, when Kejriwal took on a corrupt UPA government and Delhi's Congress government headed by Sheila Dikshit, he was seen as an RSS proxy.

From Sharad Pawar to Chidambaram, Lalu Prasad Yadav to Salman Khurshid, every leader of the current INDIA alliance was up in arms against this "RSS-BJP" sponsored movement. Countless reams of editorials and TV news cycles on the Anna Movement spoke of it being backed by the right-wing forces to alter the political dynamics in favour of the BJP.

The smug certainty with which the politicians, media houses, and an entire ecosystem called Kejriwal a BJP imposter was ludicrous. One can hardly blame them and their bovine belief system based on the pro-BJP and anti-BJP binary.