In their frenzy over the BCCI’s murky affairs, undergoing plotting and cooking in Chennai on Sunday, news TV missed playing up an interesting piece of news developing in Delhi on Sunday. Arvind Kejriwal, Indian media’s darling-turned-nonentity, announced that he would take on his bête noire, Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, head on.

Addressing the media on June 2, Kejriwal announced that he would contest the polls, to be held by October this year, from either New Delhi, the constituency from which Dikshit beat the BJP’s city strongman Vijay Jolly by over 12,000 votes in 2009, or any other seat the three-time CM decides to stand from.

From what’s emerging from Chennai as the meeting winds up, the parallel and the difference is interesting. While none of the worthies reportedly asked BCCI president N Srinivasan to step down over the scandal that has taken centrestage in the media since his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was caught on charges of aiding fixers and betters in IPL, Kejriwal was faced with a similar situation. So what did Kejriwal do that the BCCI’s political muscles could not muster?

1. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief took the bull in Delhi’s political circle by the horn. While no one at BCCI’s working committee meet in Chennai reportedly asked Srinivasan directly to step down (IS Bindra of the Punjab Cricket Association told TV only he had the “guts” to speak out and seek a direct resignation off Srinivasan), Kejriwal threw himself in a challenge bigger than most politicians can muster. Make no mistake; Sheila Dikshit’s New Delhi constituency is in no way a comfortable seat for any neta, where bureaucrats and government officers stay in pampered housing with little or no touch with the realities Kejriwal regularly claims to expose.

It’s nearly as good as taking on Mulayam Singh Yadav in Etawah, or Mamata Banerjee in South Kolkata seats.

That a drubbing in the polls might leave Kejriwal politically obliterated – how many aam Delhiites remember Vijay Jolly today? – must have been a thought that played in the AAP chief’s mind. The noun, thus, is nerve, and that’s what Kejriwal showed.

2. Not that Kejriwal did not have another option. It’s called going about in a roundabout way, like Arun Jaitley and Anurag Thakur reportedly did. The two BJP leaders, according to reports emerging from Chennai, moved a proposal to make former cricket board honcho Jagmohan Dalmiya the interim president. The option for Kejriwal was to pit another AAP functionary to take on Sheila Dikshit and keep for himself a ‘safe’ seat. The noun for this one is escapism, and that’s what Kejriwal did not show.

3. Unlike the BCCI netas, Kejriwal did not raise the tempo unnecessarily and then back out from dirtying his hands at the last moment. Look at the number of worthies who had said, in as many words, whether in letter and spirit, that they want Srinivasan out: Ajay Shirke and Sanjay Jagdale, the board’s treasurer and secretary who even resigned in protest. Resign is something even Rajiv Shukla, the Congress Rajya Sabha member and chairman of the all-important IPL, did, and IS Bindra, a former BCCI president, joined the party on Sunday. “Mr Srinivasan must step down,” he told reporters.

Both Jaitley and Thakur, big-ticket leaders in the BJP and the BCCI, had also indicated that they want a ‘clean-up’ in the cricket board by looking at the back of Srinivasan, while Jyotiraditya Scindia of the Congress, to give him credit, was the first among big-time political leaders to spell out in as many words that Srinivasan should resign.

According to buzz in the power corridors, even Rahul Gandhi had asked the Congress members in BCCI to raise the pitch after Srinivasan was quoted in the media equating his case with that of Congress president Sonia (the son-in-law with allegations of corruption; connect the dots for the rest). Even that, apparently, was not stirring enough for the Congress members in the Chennai meeting.

Seen against that, Kejriwal, who had all along promised to take on the “corrupt” Dikshit administration, has done precisely what he had said while breaking ranks with anti-corruption leader Anna Hazare to form his political: he is taking her on the only way possible – himself.

The phrase for this one all fart and no sh*t, and that’s exactly what Kejriwal didn’t do!