Messenger and Message Under One Cap

NEW DELHI - Some might assume that he had lost a bet and as a consequence has to walk around in a white cap that has “I am the common man” written on it. But Arvind Kejriwal is a very serious man not given to mirth, and the cap he has been wearing is intended to be a brooding message to India's politicians that the average citizen will not tolerate the corrupt rulers for much longer.

Arvind Kejriwal, left, during a protest in New Delhi last week.

Since April last year, when he was at the forefront of a citizens' uprising against politicians, and particularly in the last few weeks after he reiterated that he soon would establish a political party made up of honest people, of whom one-third would be honest women, Mr. Kejriwal has shaken the political class with his confident allegations of corruption against some of the nation's most powerful figures, often holding apparent documentary evidence in both hands.

Mr. Kejriwal, by general opinion, is a new kind of Indian politician. But in fact he is operating in the realm of journalism.

Journalism is the art not merely of telling a story, but also of finding permissible vehicles for telling that story. By holding Mr. Kejriwal up as a revolutionary public figure, Indian journalism has devised such a vehicle. The stories that journalists cannot tell - or cannot tell the way they wish out of fear of libel suits or their promoters' fear of politicians - are now told through coverage of Mr. Kejriwal's accusations, which may have some holes in them but retain enough substance to set off a brisk news cycle. Also, political corruption is not big news anymore in India. Rather, it is how the news is broken that is. To that end, Mr. Kejriwal, who is both messenger and message, has become a one-man news agency to whom the entire Indian media have seemingly subscribed.

Politicians are alarmed, as they would be, naturally, at the birth of any news organization that appears to have no stake in its own survival and is therefore unafraid of defamation suits.

This month, Mr. Kejriwal asserted that Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress party, had received interest-free loans and bargains on property deals from the real estate developer D.L.F. in exchange for using his political clout to advance the company's interests. Mr. Kejriwal's statement was a more emphatic version of a story reported with great caution last year by The Economic Times, a newspaper. Both D.L.F. and Mr. Vadra have dismissed his allegations.

Days later, Mr. Kejriwal accused Nitin Gadkari, president of the Congress party's archrival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, of using his position to enrich his business. Mr. Gadkari has denied any wrongdoing. Then, Mr. Kejriwal said that the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, was a “broker” who favored electrical power distribution companies. Ms. Dixit has sent him a legal notice accusing him of defamation and threatening to drag him to court if he does not apologize. Mr. Kejriwal told journalists that he was, of course, defaming her but then corrected himself to say that she was “defaming herself” through her actions.

Last year, when the social reformer Anna Hazare declared war against Indian politicians, chiefly through staging fasts, Mr. Kejriwal assumed the role of one of those classic Indian deputies who are always around public figures, tip-toeing reverentially to their bosses and whispering things into their ears, and in the process extracting a bit of notability for themselves. Mr. Kejriwal became a key player in Mr. Hazare's inner circle, known as Team Anna, though the two men have since parted ways.

Mr. Kejriwal is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, the most revered educational institution in the country. Its graduates become newsworthy if they take a low-paying job; usually they leave India in search of an affluent life. Mr. Kejriwal decided to stay in India and joined the government as a revenue officer, a job he quit about six years ago.

The last time graduates from the institute tried to enter Indian politics to clean it from within, it was a disaster. In 2006, some of them formed a political party in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Their Web site, which tried to introduce their ideology, said in what appeared to be English: “Reality is a continuum. Knowledge system, in shortest, is fragmentation imposed upon the continuum of reality.” Not surprisingly, they received very few votes when they ran for election.

But Mr. Kejriwal is different. He knows how to influence a vast body of people and how to provoke seasoned politicians into making fools of themselves. The law minister, Salman Kurshid, even threatened him with physical harm, which gave Mr. Kejriwal the opportunity to refer to himself in the third person - as is the habit among Indian film stars, politicians, martyrs and social reformers - “If one Arvind is killed, there will be another 100 Arvinds.”

In the past, angry social reformers like Mr. Kejriwal were often the key figures behind what appeared to be investigative stories and media exposés. They did most of the research and collected the evidence, which they turned over to journalists, who then usually credited them as “sources.” But now, as sometimes happens in journalism, the source has become the story.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.