The Delhi battlefield may not be a cakewalk for the Rhodes Scholar.
Fresh out of his five-month incarceration in Delhi's Tihar Jail, Arvind Kejriwal, the wily politician that he has become since his 2011 India Against Corruption days, ensured that his party remained unbreakable while he was inside jail, and was not found wanting of a public spectacle, the hallmark of AAP's militant politics, soon after his release.
Women Empowerment: The AAP Way
In one stroke, Kejriwal and AAP have scored over their opponents not just in Delhi but also in Haryana, a state headed for a triangular electoral fight among the Congress, BJP and AAP this October.
With an eye on the women voters and youth, Atishi's elevation, though surprising -- senior and experienced AAP campaigners Gopal Rai, Sanjay Singh and former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, the latter two also, just like Kejriwal, fresh out of their jail stints on charges of corruption in the Rs 100 crore excise policy scam, many experts believed, were the frontrunners -- has pitched the AAP as the champion of women empowerment.
The decision is also expected to attract the youth towards it what with Atishi being the youngest Delhi chief minister and only the third woman to hold the post after the Congress's Sheila Dixit and the BJP's Sushma Swaraj.
With Kejriwal being portrayed as a modern-day equivalent of Sita, with his sacrificial agnipariksha act of returning to the chief minister's post only after he gets a mandate from the people's court in the 2025 Delhi assembly election, Atishi, as chief minister, given her distinguished record as the education minister and the encomiums she has collected with her work with Delhi's municipal schools and overall education policy, would further ensure that the AAP will strengthen its stranglehold over Delhi, where the party now prides itself of winning 62 out of 70 assembly seats in 2020 with a little over 53 per cent vote share, absolutely decimating the BJP and Congress.
From IAC Activist to Chief Minister
Atishi's promotion as Delhi's chief minister, say commentators, now makes the AAP invincible.
The Delhi battlefield, however, will not be a cakewalk for the Rhodes Scholar from Oxford University where she pursued her master's in education.
But then Atishi has now spent 13 years honing her political skills -- fought two elections: Lost to the BJP's Gautam Gambhir in the 2019 Lok Sabha election from East Delhi and won the Kalkaji assembly seat in 2020 against the BJP's Dharamveer Singh -- in the furnace of AAP politics, after trying her hands at farming with her environmentalist husband and now full-time social activist Praveen Singh, an IIT Delhi and IIM-A alumnus, and as an educator and policy consultant.
The IAC movement, which called for transparency and accountability in government with its call for a Lokpal (Corruption Ombudsman), resonated deeply with Atishi. She was drawn to the idealism of the cause and the wave of hope it inspired.
Speaking about her involvement in the movement, Atishi has said, 'It wasn't just about corruption. It was about a collective aspiration for a government that serves its people, not the other way around.'
It was here that she met Arvind Kejriwal and other future leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party, whose vision for a people-driven political movement aligned perfectly with her own ideals.
Coming Into Her Own
Atishi, however, came into her own as an educator par excellence when she was appointed as an advisor to Delhi's then education minister Manish Sisodia after the AAP formed the government in 2015.
One of her most significant contributions in this stint is her introduction of the 'Happiness Curriculum,' that prioritised emotional well-being and holistic development over rote learning.
Her educational reforms received widespread acclaim, not just in India but internationally as well.
'The future of our nation lies in the quality of education we provide to our children. If we fail in that, we fail as a society,' is how Atishi has often articulated AAP's ideals.
Soon enough, under her leadership, public schools in Delhi saw an unprecedented turnaround, with improved infrastructure, teacher training programmes, and a renewed focus on student development catapulting her into the big league in the AAP.
Her efforts paid off: by 2019, Delhi's government schools were outperforming many private ones, a feat that had once seemed impossible.
And so, when the AAP won the 62-seat landslide in the 2020 Delhi polls, Atishi was made the education minister.
In the five years since assisting Manish Sisodia in framing educational policies till her elevation as Delhi's education minister, women and child welfare, culture, tourism and public works department minister in 2020, Atishi has travelled a long distance.
A Pragmatic Politician
Born on June 8, 1981, to Vijay Singh and Tripta Wahi, educators and activists in their own right influenced by Marxist thoughts, Atishi developed a strong sense of social justice and public welfare.
Interestingly, her parents named her Atishi Marlena -- a combination of Marx ('Mar') and Lenin ('Len'); nobody has any explanation from where the last letter 'a' came from, making her Marlena.
Equally interestingly, as her political career progressed in the AAP, Atishi was pragmatic enough to drop 'Marlena' to avoid unnecessary political controversies what with the BJP's strident 'Communism equal to urban Naxalism equal to anti-nationalism' pitch getting an audience among Delhi's voters.
In an interview later, she explained her pragmatism thus: 'I didn't want my name to be the subject of political debate. It's my work that should speak for me, not my name.'
Ironically, it is not just Atishi but even the AAP that distances itself from anything that even paints it with principles enumerated in Communism and socialism even as they prominently and proudly display portraits of an avowedly atheist and socialist Shahid Bhagat Singh and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in their ministerial offices, press conferences and make no bones about being vocal with their chants of 'Inquilab Zindabad'.
It is this assimilation of contradicting intonations to Lord Ram, Lord Hanuman and other Hindu deities with slogans that godless Communists gave in the same breath, even while shunning away godless Communism, that underlines the political acumen with which the AAP has embedded its electoral victories with, that Atishi will now have to learn at the AAP's altar to carve out her own history as Delhi's youngest woman chief minister.
Trial By Fire
Many political commentators observe that Atishi's shrewd display of political acumen was at its zenith when she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other second rung AAP leaders like Saurabh Bharadwaj, Jasmine Shah and others when they prevented an 'almost certain disintegration' of the party with Kejriwal, Sisodia and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh behind bars as part of the BJP's alleged 'Operation Kamal' being played out in Delhi.
It is to the credit of leaders like Atishi, who proved their courage and determination to not buckle under pressure, that the party held together in its darkest hour of leader-less existence.
Atishi and Bharadwaj led from the front; they were seen everywhere: Holding press conferences to defend Kejriwal, Sisodia and Singh's 'illegal arrests' by the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation, holding party meetings to plan and strategise the party's political course when party stalwarts were behind the bars, stridently attacking the BJP using its own language and idioms, hobnobbing with legal eagles and integrating the families of the arrested leaders in their fight for their release.
Atishi was equally expressive and fiery with her public speeches when these leaders were in jail and she was equally expressive when these leaders were released on jail when she could be seen hugging leaders like Sanjay Singh and Manish Sisodia on their release from jail.
It was this period when the second rung AAP leaders went through their own agniparikshas with courage and grit.
The same courage and grit will be on show, hopefully, as Atishi, a student of history from Delhi's St Stephen's College, now takes over the reins of Delhi's administration as its eighth chief minister and attempts to make her stint a historic one.
She will once again be subjected to a 'vicious campaign' by the BJP, its arch political opponent in Delhi, believe some observers, just like the ones she was subjected to over 'Marlena' and publication of obscene pamphlets during the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2020 assembly election.
AAP's Rajya Sabha MP, Swati Maliwal, who is now almost a certainty to join the BJP, has already fired the first salvo targeting Atishi for her parents' vocal support for relief to Afzal Guru who was given a death sentence by the Supreme Court for his role in the December 13, 2001 Parliament attack.
It is, without doubt, just the beginning of such attacks. And nobody would know this better than Atishi.
How Chief Minister Atishi Singh will handle such attacks will be for everyone to see but how gracefully and stoically she had handled the mudslinging against her during the two elections she contested has already proved that she has the stomach and the gumption to match her critics.
As Atishi herself once put it, 'Politics should be about making people's lives better. Everything else is secondary.'
