He is dismissed every Thursday only to be awaited with bated breath the next Wednesday. Toast of the masses, darling of the media, this swashbuckling newest kid of politics is apparently also the fiercest of them all. With India Against Corruption’s Arvind Kejriwal taking the centre stage in politics, rules of the game are being considered for a revision by the old guard.

Kejriwal broke a code of silence observed in Indian politics on matters involving family members of political leaders when he brought to light the nexus involving realty giant DLF, Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra and the Congress government in Haryana.

Even as partymen were smarting under the attack, Kejriwal targeted law minister Salman Khurshid for alleged bungling of funds in a trust for the disabled which is managed by his family. Khurshid lost the plot and cool when he called a presser to clarify things and confounded them instead by a show of rashness. He spoke a language alien to politics so far when he dared Kejriwal to come to his home constituency Farrukabad. 

The opposition savoured the plight of the perplexed Congressmen huddled in a corner and bleating in defence of the party’s son-in-law and the law minister until the next Wednesday arrived. Kejriwal went the whole hog this time against Bharatiya Janata Party chief Nitin Gadkari exposing his shady land deals in Maharashtra in collusion with Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party.  

While a thoroughly relieved BJP – they expected something bigger and not just Gadkari whose hobnobbing with industrialists is not new to the insiders – rallied behind Gadkari in support, Kejriwal came out of an always suspected shadow of the saffron party.

Soon after, in an interview given to a newspaper, Gadkari said: “The facts that details concerning Robert Vadra’s land deals were in the public domain, long before Kejriwal and Co drew attention to it. The matter was discussed within the party as well. But then we decided against raising personal issues. But from this decision it would be incorrect to draw a conclusion that there is collusion between the Congress and the BJP.” In quick response to this, Congress’ “seen there, said that” general secretary Digvijay Singh claimed on TV to have evidence of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya’s corrupt practices. The episode brought to fore the code of silence observed across party lines so religiously in politics when matters involved each other’s family members.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win – is one of the most famous misquotes of Gandhi. Attributed most accurately to US labour leader Nicholas Klein (in one of his speeches in 1918), the statement nonetheless has become a dogma for acceptance of political forces over decades. Going by this, Kejriwal is past the first two and on to the third.

While Khurshid in his latest has said "an ant" cannot be a challenge to an elephant like Congress and says the activist is having a "pipe dream" of taking the space of big parties by trying to "destroy" them through allegations, the Congress’s “seen there, said that” general secretary has called Kejriwal "self-serving ambitious megalomaniac having a "streak" of Hitler. Such comparisons sound nothing more than their own internal fears about the rise of political force which threatens to rest control over an arena they always considered their own.

While it remains to be seen if Kejriwal is actually increasing his own political landscape Wednesdays after Wednesdays, it is for sure that he is shrinking theirs. Maybe, in the political vacuum thus created, the mango man will have an opportunity to throw in his kernel.