New Delhi: On Tuesday, September 17, 2024, at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s home, Delhi Minister and AAP leader Atishi departs following a legislative party meeting. (Image: PTI)
Atishi, the finance minister of Delhi and a first-term lawmaker, will become the city’s third female chief minister. In addition, the 43-year-old will be the youngest person to occupy the top position. Arvind Kejriwal, the national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), tendered his resignation as chief minister to the Lieutenant Governor later that day, following the party’s election of her as the CM-designate by legislators earlier in the morning.
With five months until the Delhi Assembly elections, which are scheduled for mid-February 2025, the success of the AAP’s election campaign will depend on how well the Atishi-led Delhi government implements welfare programs to strengthen the party’s base of support among women, lower middle class, and the poorer sections of the national capital.
As the finance minister for Delhi, she unveiled a significant initiative at the state government’s 2024–25 Budget presentation. The initiative, called the “Mahila Samman Yojana” of the chief minister, will give eligible women in Delhi an honorarium of Rs 1,000. The AAP’s victory in the most recent Delhi Assembly elections in 2020 was attributed by post-election analyses to the party’s strong showing among women voters.
A party strategist stated that the AAP intends to strengthen its support base among women by electing a woman to be the chief minister and implementing a monthly allowance for women. Following her election as chief minister, Atishi pledged to uphold the rights of Delhi’s citizens, claiming the BJP would attempt to “obstruct” the AAP government’s welfare programs, which included free bus transportation for women, healthcare facilities, and electricity supplies. Her largest obstacle, meanwhile, would be to build friendly ties with the Lieutenant Governor’s office, as she would want his consent for projects pertaining to welfare and development in addition to governance.
Delhi has had two female chief ministers, Sheila Dikshit of the Congress and Sushma Swaraj of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), aside from Atishi. In 1998, Swaraj held the second-shortest term of any woman as chief minister, having served for just 52 days; in contrast, Dikshit has held the position for the longest.
Delhi’s opposition parties criticized Atishi’s promotion, calling it a “stop-gap” solution. Atishi, a Rhodes Scholar, didn’t contest this criticism. With a “big responsibility” and a promise to lead the government under her “guru,” Atishi praised her “Guru” Kejriwal. She asserted that Kejriwal was the legitimate chief minister of Delhi.
After completing his studies in history at Oxford, Atishi, a 2013 alumnus of Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, rose to fame as one of the AAP’s main spokespeople. She had previously been an activist in Madhya Pradesh for a number of years.
She was fired from her position as spokesman by the party leadership in 2015 because of suspicions that she had ties to two AAP founders who were kicked out of the organisation, Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav. In a letter to the two leaders, Atishi accused them of being uncooperative in resolving disagreements with the party leadership.
She served as Manish Sisodia’s advisor on education from 2015 to 2018. She ran for the Lok Sabha seat in East Delhi in 2019, but she was defeated by Gautam Gambhir of the BJP. Atishi had abandoned the portmanteau of Marx and Lenin, Marlena, before she entered electoral politics. Atishi was chosen as an MLA in 2020 to represent the Kalkaji Assembly seat.
Following Sisodia’s arrest in the excise policy case, she was appointed to the Delhi cabinet in 2023. Almost a dozen portfolios were assigned to her, the most for a single minister. When Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal of the AAP claimed that Bibhav Kumar, Kejriwal’s assistant, had attacked her, she stood up for her party and the government. When the nation’s capital was experiencing a water scarcity, she embarked on a hunger strike to demand that Haryana give Delhi its fair share of the water.
Professors Vijay Singh and Tripta Wahi were her parents’ employers at Delhi University.
The appointment of Atishi as the new chief minister of Delhi has been criticized by BJP national general secretary Tarun Chugh as a “national security risk” due to her parents’ involvement in a mercy appeal for convicted terrorist Afzal Guru, who was killed in 2013 for his role in the 2001 Parliament attack.