Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting overlooked segments and gaining a foothold by delivering better functionality. When customers start adopting the entrants’ products over the incumbent, disruption has successfully occurred.

There have been multiple disruptors, in India, in the field of business since Independence. But close to none in the field of politics. India’s political history has largely been dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC), with a generous smattering of regional players who were perennially straitjacketed by their obvious limitations.

However, in 2012, when a widely successful anti-corruption movement transmogrified into a political party – the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP or Common Man’s Party) led by Magsaysay Award winner and social activist Arvind Kejriwal – India had just found the biggest disruptor of its polity which left an increasingly young and urban nation transfixed in awe and expectations.

Upon formation, this new political unit and its leader, Kejriwal, were widely derided by regimented political pundits, and the entrenched political parties of yore, as “unconstitutional”, “undemocratic”, “anarchists”, “jholawalas”, among other such invectives which thoroughly debase public life.

What they failed to realise is that in ridiculing Kejriwal they had just legitimised him as a threat and potent force, much to their detriment.

Multiple studies have shown that an average citizen, anywhere in the world, goes through the moribund cycles of her life without caring much for politics, elections and the whole hoopla around it. To this effect, once Winston Churchill had, half-mockingly, remarked, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”.

And there is a simple reason for it: abject and utter disillusionment with the existing political mores. Most democracies, today, are defined by a bi-party system: in America it is the conservative Republicans or the neo-liberal Democrats; in the United Kingdom it is the conservative Tories or the left-leaning Labour and in India it is the right-wing BJP or the centrist Congress.

These deeply entrenched systems bring with them latent somnambulism and the putrid reek of nonchalant status quo. The existing political systems around the world are deep vortexes lined with the heady arrogance of power and money, meant to keep the common person on the margins of decision-making.

In such a prevailing scenario, Kejriwal asked a fundamental question with searing clarity: “Democracy should mean that for five years the elected government functions according to the wishes of the people whose views are taken into account before making decisions. Is this possible?”

AAP promised to make this happen – a true democracy of the people, by the people and for the people, harking back to Lincoln’s vision, and not the oligarchy that goes by the name of democracy in the free world.

This soon led every section of society from the common person on the street to lawyers, journalists, academics, engineers, doctors and well-meaning honest citizens, for the first time, to engage with the political system – in full measure and not half – and ask uncomfortable questions of our elected politicians and unelected policymakers.

Through ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and amid waves of anger and tsunamis of hope, the upstart AAP formed the state government, twice, in Delhi, the national capital of India, in 2013 and then in 2015.  The historic mandate of 67 out of 70 legislative seats was consummately achieved on a dual plank of inclusive pro-people development and stringent anti-corruption agenda.

There were some who had perpetually predicted (and still do) that Kejriwal would fade ignominiously as he is just a momentary flash in the pan. But Kejriwal continued to translate the simmering anger amid the common masses into enough votes to win elections.

Soon more successes followed for him in both governance and politics: building world acclaimed and fiscally prudent models of public education and public healthcare in Delhi; cracking down on corruption within the government and outside; giving voice to the voiceless, who were languishing at the bottom of the pecking order, by taking measures which are often pejoratively called “populist” by the privileged few; expanding into other states, constructively, as AAP was not bound by regional or compulsions of the parochial type, and setting up AAP as a credible alternative to the ruling BJP and the indolent in-opposition Congress.

Nowadays, Kejriwal is often denounced as a traditional politician who has forgotten his promise of “alternative politics”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of the brutal and often Machiavellian cut-and-thrust of Indian politics will not disagree when I say that survival and political relevance is not for the faint-hearted. The deeply ingrained realpolitik is starkly different from the vision that the rose-tinted glasses of school textbooks portend.

The ways of life and the social structures in the India society are almost contumacious in their resolve and any attempt at changing them requires one to embrace them first, if only to understand the befuddling complexity and the root causes thereof. Only then the vision of “alternative” politics can be achieved; anything else is just the chimera. Kejriwal has managed to strike this sweet spot between realpolitik and a progressive model of governance, only within three years.

However, detractors, often aided and abetted by the media, continue to lash out at this disruptor for expulsions from his party, propagate specious gossip or question certain political appointments.

Here, it is important to understand that intra-party politics is completely within the democratic realm and the executive privilege of the elected government to appoint people who resonate with its ideology is an essential feature of representative democracy. Also, it is true that a disruptor, anywhere in the world, faces consistent attack from the established class which is afraid of getting its cosy fortress impregnated. But, the malice and constant repudiation that AAP has had to face from the media and the powers to be is unprecedented in the annals of Indian political history.

If the AAP were to continue to demonstrate its strident devotion and wherewithal to implement a model of “direct democracy” and to govern in a manner which is equitable in its scope and just in its implementation, like it is doing now, that would be a more lasting democratic legacy than any.