KEJRIWAL AT A CROSSROADS

The AAP chief has been central to the party's fortunes. His arrest in the Delhi liquor scam row could put their Lok Sabha poll campaign in disarray, and even trigger an existential crisis within

- KAUSHIK DEKA

It was during the India Against Corruption (IAC) agitation in 2011 that Arvind Kejriwal shot to national fame. The movement, allegedly backed by the RSS-BJP, gave voice to the public anger against graft at a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre was fighting allegations of several scams. Social activist Anna Hazare had been the face of the campaign but, by the next year, Kejriwal had shaped the public antipathy towards the political class into a creation of his making—the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Its election symbol, the broom, was an apt representation of its intent to clean up Indian polity, resonating widely with the capital’s disillusioned electorate.

If the IAC was one of the factors behind the fall of the Congress across the nation, AAP wiped out the party in Delhi with a call to send the then chief minister Sheila Dikshit to jail for alleged involvement in corruption. But a decade into the hurly-burly of politics, Kejriwal’s own journey has taken an ironical twist. The two-time Delhi chief minister finds himself embroiled in corruption charges and under arrest, along with three other top leaders of AAP, including his deputy Manish Sisodia.

The irony did not end there. On March 21, when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested Kejriwal under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, for his alleged role in the Delhi liquor policy scam (