New Delhi: A huge crowd is waiting near Shaheen Bagh in Okhla for Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday.

The AAP leader is expected to arrive in the afternoon and his supporters have packed themselves into a long-winding road that runs through the main market and rooftops of the multi-storied buildings in the area. Some are perched precariously on balconies of scaffoldings of under-construction buildings.

Woh Kejriwal ke liye kehte hain bhagora hai,” says a local resident wielding the mike on a platform that passes off as the stage, “par unse pooche ki woh Ram Mandir se kyun bhaage, Uniform Civil Code se kyun bhaage, Article 370 ko kahan chhod diya?”

The crowd loves his rhetoric and shows its approval by raising the slogan that you are seeing everywhere in Delhi: Paanch Saal, Kejriwal.
Soon he makes way for a woman, a Congress worker who has abandoned the ‘sinking ship’ of the party. She makes the crowd raise a thunderous din with her five questions: “They ask who is Kejriwal. Isn’t he the man who wants corruption-free Delhi? Isn’t he the shopkeeper, the auto-rickshaw driver who doesn’t want to pay bribes? Isn’t he the mother who wants her children to go to a good school? Isn’t he the middle-class man who wants lower electricity bills? Aren’t you, all of us Arvind Kejriwal?”
The crowd responds with a louder Paanch Saal Kejriwal.

It is getting dark, windy and cold now, but there is no sign of Kejriwal. So, somebody starts entertaining the crowd with a Bhojpuri song about how this election is a revolution and a fight to throw out oppressors. Amidst the crowd the talk turns to 2013.

An old man tells a dozen other men sitting in a shop that he has just heard good news. “AAP 45 percent, Congress 25 and BJP 16. Aur yeh to unka ‘bikau’ channel keh raha hai. Just imagine, even they have been forced to accept the reality” he says, referring to a survey of the Okhla constituency. “And in nearby Badarpur it is 60 percent AAP. Ab to pucca hai, paanch saal Kejriwal.”

Okhla, like Badarpur, is predominantly Muslim. In the 2013 election, the Congress had won the constituency by a margin of 25,000 votes against the AAP; the BJP had also run. Just before the election however, the BJP’s candidate joined the AAP and became one of its active campaigners.

So, the surveys wouldn’t be too off the mark. A few days ago, when the Congress candidate held his meeting, the number of people who attended could be counted on fingers. “Even Congress leader Ajay Maken may lose his zamanat (deposit); why should we waste our vote?” is the question on everybody’s mind. The Congress has no answer.

“Modiji is good. He should take care of bigger things like America, and Pakistan; for solving problems we face in our daily lives Kejriwal ji is the right person. We have given Modiji a chance to run India and now we want to give Kejriwalji a chance to run Delhi,” says Brij, driver of our taxi.

It is almost 9 pm; the crowd has been waiting impatiently for Kejriwal. There is chaos on the stage; people sitting in front are bored with speakers, so they start heckling the speaker. Some shout him down, while others flail their arms to ask him to shut up.

From where we are watching, about 500 metres from the dias, nothing is visible. But suddenly there is thunderous clapping, a few youngsters start dancing and the slogan shouting reaches a crescendo. Kejriwal has arrived.

Unable to get even a glimpse of their hero, people gather in front of two giant screen installed by the organizers. There is so much anarchy on the stage that the camera is shaking violently. So, there is still no sign of Kejriwal, only his voice tells us that he is here.

He starts with his trademark cough. And people clap. He talks about his 49 days, apologises for quitting, asks for a majority this time, promises cheaper electricity, free water and ‘hafta-mukt‘ roads and bazaars of Delhi.
Jis jiske account mein 15 lakh aa gaye woh haath upar karo,” he says and the, enthused by the response, he begins roaring. “Modi ji kehte hain main naxali hoon; unke ek MP kehte hain main haramkhor hoon; koi kehta hai main bandar hoon aur aaj who keh rahe hain main chor hoon.”

“Kya Kejriwal chor hai?” he asks and then dares the finance minister to put him in jail, saying it is their government; they control the system, the investigating agencies. “Himmat hai to jail mein daal ke dikhaye.”

The crowd loves the spectacle, the drama and the dialogue. This is almost like cinema where a common man, an unlikely hero all of 5 feet and a few inconsequential inches, is challenging the legend and might of 56-inch. Some of the youth start dancing, the women clap and men stare with their mouths open. Somewhere a kid screams, paanch saal Kejriwal.

In November, before the elections were announced, Kejriwal was not even in the race. Surveys gave his party just 15 seats; there was heavy betting in satta markets on the BJP winning 55 seats. And now, Kejriwal is the front runner.

Never in the history of India since the advent of 24-hour television and opinion polls, has any party come back from the dead to become a front-runner in an election. Nobody has trebled its seats in surveys, starting with around 10 and going up to 40. But the AAP and Arvind Kejriwal appear to be pulling off a miracle, a veritable daylight heist on the vote-bank of the BJP.

With just four days left for the Delhi polls, most of the opinion polls are predicting a majority for the AAP. The average of all surveys-conducted by top media houses including Times of India, Hindustan Times and a few TV channels- suggest AAP will win 35 seats in Delhi, with the BJP expected to bag around 35 and the Congress likely to win just five seats.

Opinion polls have got it wrong many times in the past, especially in smaller states. A few years ago, psephologists had botched it up completely in Punjab, suggesting that the Akali Dal would lose. A decade ago, most pollsters wrongly predicted that the BJP would win the Lok Sabha polls because of its ‘India Shining’ campaign.

So, there is indeed a statistical probability of the surveys getting it wrong yet again and the results being completely different from the surveys.

“Hawa hai Kejriwal ki,” says Mushtaq Ahmed, who is doing a brisk business in paani-puri at the venue of the Okhla meeting. In the background, on a TV inside Agarwals-the ubiquitous Delhi food chain-an anchor is asking a pollster on Headlines Today to stick his neck out.

“Is this a wave?” he asks, pointing at the results of the HT-Cicero poll that gives AAP more than 40 seats.

Hawa or a wave? If you are out in the streets of Okhla, listening to the aam aadmi and his wife, the answer is blowing in the winter wind.