Volunteer to CM, the steep rise of Atishi
Atishi was inducted into the state government for the first time in March 2023, following then deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia’s arrest in the Delhi excise policy case. Since then, she has held the most portfolios in the Delhi government, with charge of over 12ministries – including education, the public works department, power, revenue, planning, finance, services, vigilance, water, and public relations.
Atishi’s ascension as Delhi’s chief minister-designate marks a meteoric rise to the zenith of the national capital’s political arena for a 43-year-old, who 11 years ago surrendered a career in academia to join a fledgling outfit that aimed to unsettle the city’s electoral space.
From being a volunteer during the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) early days at its congested two-room office space in New Delhi to becoming the Capital’s eighth chief minister, Atishi’s political career has traced a dramatic arc.
To be sure, Atishi and the party have said that she’s a placeholder until the next elections, and that Kejriwal will return as CM if the AAP wins another term. But her steepest rise through the ranks has coincided with the party’s most turbulent phase over the past two years – when nearly all of the AAP brass found itself behind bars in a string of cases and a fresh crop of leaders were propelled into senior positions.
Atishi was inducted into the state government for the first time in March 2023, following then deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia’s arrest in the Delhi excise policy case. Since then, she has held the most portfolios in the Delhi government, with charge of over 12ministries – including education, the public works department, power, revenue, planning, finance, services, vigilance, water, and public relations.
But most of all, she has emerged as the face of the Delhi government during the incarcerations of Sisodia and Kejriwal.
Born Atishi Singh to Delhi University professors Tripta Wahi and Vijay Singh in 1981.Her parents, both avowed leftists, changed her surname to “Marlena” – a portmanteau derived from the surnames of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
That surname would, in years to come, hang heavy around her neck.
She studied at Springdales School, Pusa Road, standing out among her peers as a “bright, inquisitive student”.
“She was questioning and well-read,” said Jyoti Bose, the director of Springdales Schools who was also a teacher at Springdales, Pusa Road.
“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,” said Bose.
Atishi completed Class 12 in 1998 and enrolled in St Stephen’s College to study history, graduating in 2001. She then pursued her first Master’s degree in History from Oxford University as a Chevening Scholar.
Two years later, Atishi earned her second Master’s from Magdalen College in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, with a focus on educational research – a degree that formed the underpinnings of her work with Delhi’s government school.
According to an AAP functionary, Atishi then spent seven years in rural Madhya Pradesh, where she worked on organic farming and progressive education systems.
Towards the end of her time in that village, the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement led by Anna Hazare had rocked the national capital and sowed the seeds of the AAP’s formation.
Atishi gravitated towards the party and Kejriwal’s promises of corruption-free government, robust welfare and, crucially, educational reform.
“She worked with several non-profit organisations and met some AAP members there for the first time there.”
She left the village for the Capital and walked into the AAP’s office on Hanuman Road in 2013.
Within weeks, Atishi clawed her way into the young party’s decision-making unit and became a key member of the AAP panel tasked with drawing up the party’s first-ever manifesto for the 2013 Delhi elections.
The party eventually stunned the incumbent Congress, winning 28 seats on its own and relegating the latter to just eight.
At the same time, Atishi also made her presence felt as a spokesperson on television debates, cementing her position with the party.
The party arrived at a critical moment in 2015, when founding members and senior leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, who Atishi was close to, quit the party after accusing Kejriwal of deviating from the AAP’s founding principles. It was widely expected that Atishi, who was Yadav and Bhushan’s protege, would follow the two out of the party. However, she chose to stay on, aligning her fortunes with Kejriwal instead.
In parallel, she worked as Sisodia’s adviser from July 2015 to April 2018, orchestrating major changes to Delhi’s government schools.
The party credits her as the key architects of Delhi’s “education revolution”, wherein she played a key role in improving infrastructure of Delhi government schools. Her policy interventions have continued to ensure that Delhi’s government schools are ranked among the best in the country and Delhi has one of largest budget spending in education sector. Projects like “Mission Buniyaad”, “Happiness Curriculum” and “Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum” were her brainchild. In 2022, she addressed the UNGA in New York, highlighting Delhi as a global model for urban governance.
She is also credited with forming school management committees (SMC) under the Right to Education Act, strengthening regulations to restrain private schools from increasing fees arbitrarily, and introducing the Happiness curriculum, besides working to improve the infrastructure of Delhi’s government schools.
But Delhi’s electoral waters haven’t always been kind to Atishi.
She contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from the East Delhi segment, losing to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker Gautam Gambhir by over 476,000 votes.
Ahead of the 2019 polls, Atishi dropped the Marlena surname to prevent the BJP from trying to polarise voters. The latter had suggested she was a “foreigner and a Christian”. BJP MP Manoj Tiwari on Tuesday claimed “Atishi follows an urban-Naxal ideology, and her very name reflects this —being derived from Marx and Lenin.” “The ideology that she follows is dangerous…..and Atishi herself has made anti-national and defamatory statements from public platforms,” Tiwari said.
Atishi also changed her handle on X (then Twitter) from @AtishiMarlena to @AtishiAAP, even as she stressed that her “real surname” was Singh and that she was from a Punjabi Rajput family.
She was eventually elected as a lawmaker for the first time from the Kalkaji assembly constituency in February 2020, defeating the BJP’s Dharambir Singh by over 11,000 votes.
But she has had the bulk of her influence within the Delhi government since Sisodia’s arrest, with her sway deepening after Kejriwal was imprisoned.
This June, Atishi went on a four-day long hunger strike over an acute water shortage in the city. That fast ended only after she was hospitalised following a sharp downturn in her health.
But her importance within the party was underlined further when Kejriwal, this August, 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 LG turned this request down and nominated her cabinet colleague Kailash Gahlot instead.
By this time, the message that she was a trusted Kejriwal aide, and perhaps the first among equals in the council of ministers, had percolated across the party’s rank-and-file.