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New Delhi: Delhi Minister and AAP leader Atishi leaves after a meeting of the legislative party at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence, in New Delhi, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (Photo: PTI)
Delhi Finance Minister Atishi, a first-term legislator, will be the third woman chief minister of Delhi. The 43-year-old will also have the distinction of being the youngest to hold the top office. Earlier in the morning, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators elected her CM-designate and party’s national convener Arvind Kejriwal submitted his resignation as chief minister to the Lieutenant Governor later in the day.
With five months left for the Delhi Assembly polls, slated for mid-February 2025, AAP’s election campaign will rest on the efficient rollout of welfare schemes by the Atishi-led Delhi government to consolidate its core support base among the national capital’s women, poorer sections and lower middle class.
A key scheme, which she announced as Delhi’s finance minister while presenting the state government’s 2024-25 Budget, is to provide Rs 1,000 honorarium to eligible women in Delhi under the chief minister’s “Mahila Samman Yojana”. Post-poll studies of the last Delhi Assembly polls in 2020 had credited AAP’s win to the massive support it received from the women electorate.
With a woman as the CM, and the rollout of the monthly allowance for women, AAP hopes to consolidate its support base among women, a party strategist said. After being elected to be the CM, Atishi said she would protect the interests of Delhi’s residents, alleging the BJP would try to “obstruct” the AAP government’s welfare schemes like free electricity supply, facilities at hospitals, and free bus rides for women. But her biggest challenge would be to establish cordial relations with the Lieutenant Governor’s office since she would need his approval for governance as well as welfare and development-related works.
Apart from Atishi, Delhi has had two women chief ministers — Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Sushma Swaraj and Congress’ Sheila Dikshit. While Swaraj served for a mere 52 days in 1998, the second shortest tenure for a woman CM, Dikshit has been the longest-serving woman chief minister of the country.
Opposition parties in Delhi criticised Atishi’s elevation as a “stop-gap” arrangement. It is a criticism that Atishi, a Rhodes Scholar, didn’t dispute. Atishi thanked her “Guru” Kejriwal for the “big responsibility”, saying she will run the government under his “guidance”. She said Kejriwal was the true occupant of Delhi’s chief ministerial chair.
A graduate from Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, who later studied history at Oxford, Atishi came to prominence as one of AAP’s leading spokespersons in 2013. Earlier, she had spent several years in Madhya Pradesh as an activist.
In 2015, the party leadership removed her as a spokesperson as it was felt she was close to Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, two of AAP’s founding members, who were expelled from the party. Atishi wrote a letter to the two leaders where she accused them of their intransigence in ironing out differences with the party leadership.
From 2015 to 2018, she worked as an advisor to Education Minister Manish Sisodia. In 2019, she contested the Lok Sabha polls from the East Delhi seat, where she lost to BJP’s Gautam Gambhir. Before venturing into electoral politics, Atishi had dropped her surname Marlena, a portmanteau of Marx and Lenin. In 2020, Atishi was elected an MLA from the Kalkaji Assembly seat.
In 2023, she was inducted into the Delhi cabinet in the aftermath of Sisodia’s arrest in the excise policy case. She was entrusted with almost a dozen portfolios, the most for a single minister. She defended her party and the government when AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal alleged assault by Kejriwal’s aide Bibhav Kumar. She went on a hunger strike to demand Delhi’s water share from Haryana when the national capital was grappling with shortage of water.
Her parents Vijay Singh and Tripta Wahi were Delhi University professors.
BJP national general secretary Tarun Chugh alleged that appointing Atishi as the new CM of Delhi was a “national security risk” as her parents were associated with a mercy petition for convicted terrorist Afzal Guru, who was hanged in 2013 for his role in the 2001 Parliament attack.
First Published: Sep 17 2024 | 10:05 PM IST
