‘If you want to clean rot…’: AAP's Isudan Gadhvi recalls what Kejriwal told him

Journalist-turned-politician Isudan Gadhvi, who has been named as the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) chief ministerial candidate for the Gujarat assembly elections, has urged the people of the state to give the party one opportunity and said he will quit politics if he fails to deliver in the next five years.

“I promise the people of Gujarat that I will keep on working for the people,” Gadhvi said at an event where Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that the 40-year-old Gadhvi got as many as 73 per cent votes in a poll conducted by the party.

“Have faith in me, "I want to say heartfelt thanks to the Aam Aadmi Party, Arvind Kejriwal ji and especially the people of Gujarat for giving such a big responsibility to a common man like me,” Gadhvi also tweeted.

On why he joined politics, Gadhvi said, I was a successful journalist; had been raising issues of the common man. I tried to be the voice of farmers, labourers, students, women and small traders. I tried my best but there is a limit because of rot in the system. Kejriwal ji had told me ‘if you want to clean the rot, you have to dive into the muck even if people abuse you. Some abuse me as well, but these people are politicians. The common man will never abuse you’. That's when I decided to join politics."

Gadhvi also got emotional remembering his father. “I come from a father's family. But my father taught me a lot. When he was seriously ill, I had put in my papers. I went back to my village. But it was my father who had asked me to go back to Ahmedabad to continue journalism and raise the voice of the people,” Gadhvi said.

Gadhvi was pitted against state party unit chief Gopal Italia, who played a key role in the Patidar community agitation. He hails from a farmers’ family in Dwarka district’s Pipaliya village and belongs to the other backward castes, which account for 48 per cent of the state’s population. Kejriwal said the party conducted the poll by asking people to call a phone number and listen to a recorded message which asked them to choose their chief ministerial face.