Arvind Kejriwal, 'bomb-thrower' of Indian politics

New Delhi: Hundreds of reporters stood waiting, everyone expecting a helping of scandal, and Arvind Kejriwal did not disappoint. He pushed past the television cameras, smiling slyly in his white Gandhian cap, and took a seat on the podium. The crowd pressed forward, drawn by the question now shaking India's political establishment: Who will Arvind go after next?

Slight and bespectacled, with a neatly trimmed mustache, Mr. Kejriwal, 44, could be mistaken for a bookkeeper, rather than what he has become - the unlikely bomb thrower of Indian politics. His recent appearance was one of his staged media spectacles, in which he has produced documents and levelled corruption charges at some of India's most powerful political figures. Corruption, he argues, corrodes all the political parties in a fundamentally compromised system.

His solution? The formation of a new political party, in time for national elections in 2014.

"We hope that the people of this country will be able to do something in 2014," Mr. Kejriwal said.

That Mr. Kejriwal is now one of India's most powerful figures represents a strikingly swift turnaround. Only months ago, conventional wisdom held that he was finished politically. He had been the mastermind of the huge anticorruption movement that last year shook the country - but had then seemed to miscalculate.

First, the movement fizzled. Then, earlier this year, his alliance shattered with Anna Hazare, the hunger striker and symbol of the movement: Mr. Hazare unexpectedly balked over plans to form a political party.

Politicos snickered that Mr. Kejriwal's party, without Mr. Hazare, would be dead before it was born. Mr. Kejriwal, the backstage manager, would now be the public face, which raised a question: Would ordinary Indians rally behind a party whose public draw was a wiry, intense former tax examiner? That remains to be seen, but no one is snickering at Mr. Kejriwal any longer.

Instead, he is feared. He has accused Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, the country's most powerful politician, of reaping millions in improper real estate deals. He has delved into the business dealings of Nitin Gadkari, leader of the main opposition party. He has alleged improprieties in a charity for the handicapped run by the family of Salman Khurshid, the country's new foreign minister - prompting a barely veiled threat from Mr. Khurshid.

In some instances, he is merely resurrecting and amplifying existing accusations. Yet, through it all, Mr. Kejriwal has steadily pushed his simple, if radical, message: India's democracy, the largest in the world, does not merely need reform. India needs a revolution.

It is Sunday night, three days after Mr. Kejriwal's news conference on Oct. 25. His target that day was Reliance Industries Ltd., India's most powerful corporation, which he accused of exerting political influence to bilk billions of dollars on natural gas contracts. (On Friday, Mr. Kejriwal held another news conference, this time accusing Mukesh Ambani, the owner of Reliance, and others of illegally stashing money overseas.)

Reliance has denied the charges - as have all of his targets - but Mr. Kejriwal seemed pleased. The establishment has been rattled.

Now Mr. Kejriwal sat inside a cramped conference room of his headquarters, in a small house at the edge of the capital, beside a dingy slum. He was engaged in a ritual of Indian politics: the public audience. One man had travelled hundreds of miles to pledge his support. Another unexpectedly started singing a tribute song. A father and mother presented their 10-year-old son as a future foot soldier in Mr. Kejriwal's efforts.

"After seeing you," the boy's mother said, "I have the courage that now we can raise our voices."

Mr. Kejriwal grew up in the city of Hisar, in the northern state of Haryana, the son of an engineer. Like many ambitious Indians, his parents wanted him to become a doctor or an engineer, and the young Mr. Kejriwal studied obsessively to gain entrance to India's most prestigious engineering school. After graduation, he worked for three years as a mechanical engineer before testing into India's elite civil service as a tax examiner.

It would change his life. He met his wife, another tax examiner, but also found himself confronted with rampant bribe-taking. "There was corruption at every stage," Mr. Kejriwal recalled.

He grew disillusioned and quietly got involved in the nationwide effort by civil society groups that resulted in the Right to Information, the 2005 law that established a public right to access official records and documents. He had taken a formal leave from the tax bureau in 2000 and would earn international recognition after founding Parivartan, a nonprofit group focused on government transparency and accountability.

Then in 2006, Mr. Kejriwal decided to quit the civil service to become a full-time social activist, tendering his resignation without even telling his wife. Four years later, Mr. Kejriwal became involved in efforts that have lasted for decades to create an independent anticorruption agency, known as the Lokpal.

The Lokpal campaign, led by Mr. Hazare, brought together an odd coalition of civil society leaders, in what became known as Team Anna. To a degree, Mr. Kejriwal was the least established of these advisers, yet he quickly positioned himself as the key adviser to Mr. Hazare. And he was instrumental in building an organization, India Against Corruption, that was laden with technology-savvy young people who used the Internet and social media to make the Lokpal cause a nationwide campaign.

But if some allies regarded Mr. Kejriwal as a committed activist and brilliant tactician, others saw him as calculating and manipulative, a Rasputin whispering in Mr. Hazare's ear.

"I could see through Arvind's manipulative tactics from the very beginning," said Swami Agnivesh, a longtime social activist who broke from Team Anna. "He was trying to get control of Anna, more and more."

Ultimately, Team Anna splintered, after efforts stalled to pass Lokpal legislation in India's Parliament. Today, Mr. Kejriwal blames India's lawmakers for breaking their promise; yet others say Mr. Kejriwal's uncompromising nature and refusal to budge in negotiations helped kill any deal.

"Today," Mr. Kejriwal said, "these parties are very good at fighting elections on the basis of money and muscle power. We cannot win on that turf."

The question, of course, is whether Mr. Kejriwal's party can win anything at all. He and his team are expected to announce formal plans for the party - as well as the party's name - at some point this month. Mr. Kejriwal has certainly tapped into public anger over official corruption, especially among India's urban middle class, yet there is no certainty that anger will translate into votes against established parties with entrenched vote bank machines.

Mr. Kejriwal also has competition on other fronts: Mr. Hazare and a handful of others are reconstituting their anticorruption movement, even contemplating opening an office down the street from Mr. Kejriwal, according to Indian news media. But Mr. Kejriwal is careful to praise Mr. Hazare, saying he remains an ally, while emphasizing that the decision to enter electoral politics was a difficult one.

"We are getting into the system to change the system," he said.

Mr. Kejriwal said his initial focus would be to field candidates in next year's state elections in Delhi, the city-state that includes the national capital, New Delhi. This might be his best chance, since much of the middle class uprising over the Lokpal occurred in the capital. Meanwhile, Mr. Kejriwal seems likely to keep attacking the political elite.

"This little tiny ant has gotten inside the trunk of an elephant," said Yogendra Yadav, a prominent political scientist who is serving as an adviser to the new party, "and the elephant is hopping mad."

The analogy with morals lies upon the surface. A habit impeded in overt operation continues nonetheless to operate. It manifests itself in desireful thought, that is in an ideal or imagined object which embodies within itself the force of a frustrated habit. There is therefore demand for a changed environment, a demand which can be achieved only by some modification and rearrangement of old habits. Even Plato preserves an intimation of the natural function of ideal objects when he insists upon their value as patterns for use in reorganization [pg 054] of the actual scene. The pity is that he could not see that patterns exist only within and for the sake of reorganization, so that they, rather than empirical or natural objects, are the instrumental affairs. Not seeing this, he converted a function of reorganization into a metaphysical reality. If we essay a technical formulation we shall say that morality becomes legitimately subjective or personal when activities which once included objective factors in their operation temporarily lose support from objects, and yet strive to change existing conditions until they regain a support which has been lost. It is all of a kind with the doings of a man, who remembering a prior satisfaction of thirst and the conditions under which it occurred, digs a well. For the time being water in reference to his activity exists in imagination not in fact. But this imagination is not a self-generated, self-enclosed, psychical existence. It is the persistent operation of a prior object which has been incorporated in effective habit. There is no miracle in the fact that an object in a new context operates in a new way.

to sir kejriwal
i really appreciate everything u have done in your fight against corruption and i also want to help u in your great work. these are my views regarding you and your work .there is no doubt that whatever u r doing will help india and its people but there r some weakness in your ideology and thinking which are creating problen in your way . no doubt you r totally unselfish , simple and very nice person and u have many more such qualities which i can count to prove that u are one out of millions but sometime being more good than enough can be harm us and your problem is the same that u r much more good , nice and foolishly idealistic person than u should be if u really want to change something on practical grounds because ur kind of person born just once in a centuries and i feel that u could do much more if u could see the real world without those stupid gogles of idealism . sir i want to say that we are not purely spirtual beings ,we r humans and we are not supposed to be that much good if we really want to do something on practical grounds . sir you r kind of person who think more about principles , what is right and wrong ? , what is moral or what is good or evil . no doubt these qualities which shows our spiritual side but u are crossing the limits and this is adversely effecting the practical output of your work .for example if now u r saving 100 lives then being little more practical u can save 1000000 or more and is is a fact . you are playing with rules but those bad guys dont have any rules . i m not saying that u should become immoral but one thing i am very sure that if u dont start caring about the practical output of your work than u would not earn any thing other than pain for you and your family ( i m sorry but this is what i really think) let me help you to clear your few doubts
1.what u think: all indians(humans) are equal
reality : we are equal just in books of laws but in reality we are all different and you cannot treat everyone equally you can ask this question from any psychologist .some person are intelligent but other are foolish, some people have more good qualities because they inherit those qualities from there parents or because of there environment and some are retarded and feeble minded because of the same reasons so sir i want to say that nature dont think that what is moral and immoral this is nature who is not fare and who dont treat everyone then how can your kind of wise person can expect same kind of wisdom from every human being .
2. what u think : because common people are victims they must be good one
reality : being a victim ,poor does not mean that those people are are more moral and better than those who are rich and in power but reality is very different . if a person live his/her life in pain , troubles and hardships then his /her problems turn him into more selfish more immoral person because these are poor people or common people who suffer most .
that is why we cannot expect moral behaviour from those poor indians and that is why crime rate is more in our poorer states than prosperous . so the main idea is that u should not worry much about good and bad but you should worry more about the practial significace of your work
3.what you think: i am proud to be good ,moral person and flawless and i am helping m country
reality : whatever you are and whatever good qualities you and your personality have ,all credit goes to nature because of which you inherit such good qualites and the social environment which help you to be such a spiritual and nice person but but now only thing which is going to be count as your is your will to really help the humanity
4.what you think :strategy which work 60 year ago will work today
reality :circumstances in our country is not the same like it was 50-60 year ago please dont be to insane to think that your nonviolence policies will work in today time
my suggestion
1. never overlook the bad side of the people you are supporting if humanbeings have good qualities like honesty , love , peace then every phuman also have bad qualities like selfishness, anger, violence and we cannot deny it.
2.killing one person is never bad if it can save millions( its just an example that sometime if being little immoral can help in greater good than then nothing is more better then this little bad
3.if religion can be used as weapon by other corrupted parties then why cannot you use it for welfare of other.

in the end , sometime we beleive that we are doing everything perfectly in the way an ideal person should do but we are totally wrong