TAKE Arvind Kejriwal’s talk of “revolution” seriously. Back in June, crammed with this correspondent into a tiny Suzuki car in east Delhi, he predicted electoral triumph for his Aam Aadmi (“common man”) anti-graft volunteers. It sounded fanciful at the time. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is just a few months old. Even as recently as late November Delhi’s chief minister for the past 15 years, Sheila Dikshit, was roundly dismissing Mr Kejriwal as an irrelevance. Mr Kejriwal himself toppled Mrs Dikshit in a constituency that she thought was cast-iron, crammed as it is with babus (civil servants) and presumed staunch Congress loyalists. Across Delhi Congress won just eight of 70 assembly seats, its worst-ever result.
The AAP, with a broom as its party symbol, swept to 28 seats, a stunning debut for a group of political amateurs. In Delhi 120,000 unpaid volunteers knocked on doors to discuss inflation and graft. Two populist promises, to halve household electricity bills and provide 700 litres of free water, went down well. Word also spread in old-fashioned ways: every motorised rickshaw in the city seemed to carry a poster of a broom. The AAP squeezed in second behind the established Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which got 32 seats, just short of a majority. Neither is ready to form a minority administration, nor to cut a power-sharing deal, with a national election only a few months away (by May at the latest). So Delhi will probably need to vote again next year.