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Described as the key lieutenant of veteran social activist Anna Hazare, 46-year-old Arvind Kejriwal, a mechanical engineer from IIT-Kharagpur, joined Tata Steel in 1989.
He quit in 1992 after making it to the Indian Revenue Service. However, in early 2000, he took long leave, set up an NGO, Parivartan, and plunged into social activism, taking up the cause of Right to Information, a campaign led by well-known social activist Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and others associated with the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information.
In 2006, the Haryana-born Kejriwal resigned as Joint Commissioner, Income-Tax. In the same year, he caught public eye after bagging the Ramon Magsaysay award for Emergent Leadership for his work on RTI.
In 2012, with Jantar Mantar as the battleground, Kejriwal became a part of what is known as the ‘Anna agitation’ under the aegis of India Against Corruption, demanding a Jan Lokpal. He was among the key members of Team Anna, along with senior advocates Shanti Bhushan, Santosh Hegde and Prashant Bhushan and former IPS officer Kiran Bedi.
When three hunger strikes by Hazare, one by Baba Ramdev and various meetings of the joint Lokpal Bill drafting committee with the UPA government failed to meet all their demands and egged on by the Government to first get people’s mandate, Kejriwal and the Bhushans parted ways with Hazare and announced the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party in 2012-end.
After forming AAP, Kejriwal focussed on Delhi and came out with various ‘exposes’ on alleged corruption involving the DLF-Robert Vadra land deal, UPA and BJP ‘favouring’ Reliance’s interests in the KG-D6 basin, on land acquisition by former BJP president Nitin Gadkari’s sugar mills, among others.
After winning 28 seats and 30 per cent vote share, AAP fell short of a majority in the 70-member House in the December 2013 elections, with the BJP emerging as the single largest party with 31 seats. Later, it formed a Government with support from eight Congress MLAs, which lasted for only 49 days.
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