From a first-time lawmaker in 2020 to Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal’s successor as the Delhi chief minister, Atishi, 43, has come a long way over the last four years. Kejriwal proposed her name for the Capital’s top elected post on Tuesday after AAP lawmakers authorised him to pick his successor.
Atishi’s rise in the party and the government coincided with the worst crisis the AAP faced since its formation with the arrest of its top leaders including Kejriwal and his former deputy Manish Sisodia for alleged irregularities in now scrapped 2021-2022 excise police. She held the highest number of portfolios, including key ones of education, public works department, power, revenue, planning, finance, services, vigilance, water, and public relations, after her induction into the government for the first time following Sisodia’s arrest in 2023.
She emerged as the face of the government when Kejriwal was arrested this year. In August, Kejriwal wrote to lieutenant governor VK Saxena recommending that Atishi be allowed to hoist the Tricolour at Delhi’s Independence Day celebrations in his absence. The recommendation underlined Atishi’s significance in the Cabinet even as Saxena nominated her colleague Kailash Gahlot to unfurl the flag.
Atishi is a University of Oxford and Delhi University alumna with postgraduate degrees in education and history. A recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Oxford, she joined AAP in 2013 and worked as Sisodia’s advisor from July 2015 to April 2018.
Atishi is credited with forming School Management Committees under the Right to Education Act, strengthening regulations to restrain private schools from increasing fees arbitrarily, and introducing the Happiness Curriculum besides playing a key role in improving the infrastructure at Delhi government schools.
She was elected as a lawmaker for the first time from the Kalkaji assembly constituency months after she unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha elections from East Delhi against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Gautam Gambhir.
Ahead of the 2019 polls, Atishi dropped her second name Marlena to prevent the BJP from trying to polarise voters by suggesting that she was a “foreigner and a Christian”. AAP said her parents, Delhi University professors Tripta Wahi and Vijay Singh were Leftists, who gave her the title Marlena combining the surnames of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Her Twitter handle was also changed from @AtishiMarlena to @AtishiAAP as Atishi underlined her actual surname is Singh and she comes from a Punjabi Rajput family. She said she did not want to waste time proving her identity to people. The Punjabi community is considered an influential voting bloc in the Capital.
Jyoti Bose, the principal of Atishi’s alma mater Springdales School in New Delhi, said Atishi stood out as a “bright kid, very inquisitive, questioning and well read” over her two years at the institute in Class 11 and 12. “She has remained linked with the school and was present at the funeral of the school founder in 2022. We are happy that a pupil from school will be the next chief minister of Delhi.”
Atishi, who addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York highlighting Delhi as a global model for urban governance in 2022, studied history at Delhi’s prestigious St Stephen’s College before pursuing her first master’s degree at the University of Oxford. She earned her second Master’s from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in educational research.
An AAP functionary said Atishi spent seven years in a small village in Madhya Pradesh, where she was involved in organic farming and progressive education systems before joining AAP. “She worked with several non-profit organisations and met some AAP members there for the first time there.”
Atishi, who has been a part of the AAP since its inception, was a key member of the party’s manifesto drafting committee for the 2013 assembly election. She played an important role in shaping the party’s policies in the early stages of formation. Atishi made her presence felt as a spokesperson for the AAP on television debates and in part helped her quick rise in the party.