Rise and fall: A crusader who became part of politics he set out to dismantle

In the fog of winter in the Capital in 2011, a silhouette emerged - a bespectacled IIT Kharagpur graduate who eschewed his Indian Revenue Service (IRS) position to find himself at the vanguard of India's most significant anticorruption movement in four decades.

- Dhrubo Jyoti and Alok KN Mishra

With a basic ballpoint pen in his pocket, muffler wrapped around his neck, baggy sweaters and driving a blue Wagon R car, Arvind Kejriwal quickly caught the imagination of the middle-class as an archetypal common man.

As his then mentor Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement galvanised the youth, Kejriwal emerged as its chief strategist. In the sweltering heat of Ramlila Maidan, he transformed the arcane Jan Lokpal Bill into a compelling street rhetoric. And when he announced a nascent political party named after the "aam aadmi" in November 2012 at the historic Jantar Mantar, it marked the commoner's metamorphosis from activist to politician.

Less than a year later, the infant party was racing to take the establishment heavyweights -the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. It emerged from the melee of the poll season with an astonishing 28 seats, The commoner had gripped the pulse of the Capital.

A new political era had begun.

That was in 2013. Twelve years later, on Saturday, that story came full circle.

Kejriwal now shorn of his muffler, ballpoint pen, and once-signature cough - crashed to the worst defeat of his political career.

No longer a commoner but one of India's top leaders and a three-time chief minister, the 56-year-old now faces an existential crisis as his party lost control of the city that acted as his political cradle but which now has banished his party to the opposition benches - he will not even be in assembly for the next five years.