Over the past 75 years, there have been at least 800 state government terms ruled by around 375 political leaders as chief ministers and counting. Populist leaders are a small but pivotal subset among these leaders. Scholarship on such leaders has necessarily been long on descriptive accounts because of their exceptional rise to and stay in political office. Such accounts are the basis upon which this comparative account is built.

The unit of analysis in this study is not a populist personality over a period of time, but a personality in a particular year that corresponds with either an assembly or a national election year. For example, a single case would not be “Kejriwal,” but would instead be cases like “Kejriwal 2015” or “Kejriwal 2020.” This chapter, therefore, does not aim to provide elaborate accounts of the leaders, but tries to strike a balance with the details and their relevance and, in doing so, provide a narrative of each that is tenable for comparative analysis.

This “case by year” approach seems justified for a couple of reasons. First, while almost all populist leaders come to power riding a wave, they inevitably routinize into the mainstream over successive elections. The fever breaks. Second, it may appear that the period of such long-term leaders is linear, that is, from the heights of riding a wave to come to power, and subsequently routinizing into a banal steady but sustained popularity over time. Breaking this narrative into multiple periods provides space for curvilinear possibilities because it allows for a closer look into the ups and downs of political life in that declining trajectory.