What Atishi's elevation as CM means for her, Kejriwal and the BJP

His decision to step down as Delhi’s chief minister may have stunned his party colleagues and rivals alike, but there was nothing surprising about Arvind Kejriwal’s pick of his successor on Tuesday (September 17). After two days of hectic intra-party deliberations, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convener and his party’s Delhi MLA finally chose 43-year-old Atishi as their legislative party leader.

Atishi to take over new cabinet

Later in the day, with Atishi in tow, Kejriwal called on Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena to formally hand over his resignation from the chief minister’s post. As per protocol, Atishi also handed Saxena letters of support from her party MLAs, making her Delhi’s chief minister-designate. While it isn’t yet known when Atishi would be sworn-in as the chief minister, she is now on the cusp of becoming only the third woman to hold Delhi’s high office after BJP’s Sushma Swaraj and Congress’s Sheila Dikshit.

AAP sources said Kejriwal, former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, Atishi and other senior leaders of the party will, “in a day or two”, finalise the new council of ministers for Delhi – most likely retaining most current ministers while inducting at least two new faces, possibly a Dalit and a Muslim. The swearing-in ceremony for Atishi and the new cabinet, which would hold office until elections for Delhi are called – in February next year, per schedule, or earlier as Kejriwal has been demanding remains to be seen – will take place before the special two-day session of the Delhi Assembly is called.

Fireworks likely

The AAP wants the session to be held on September 26 and 27. Whether the Delhi LG, never one to readily concede the AAP’s demands, will give his nod for calling the special session on these dates will also be known over the next few days. Nonetheless, what is clear is that whenever the Assembly is convened, Kejriwal, along with Atishi, will use the session to launch a belligerent strike against the BJP while projecting the AAP convener’s resignation from the chief minister’s post as an ‘unprecedented sacrifice’ and a mark of his ‘enduring faith in the people of Delhi’, among many other similar articulations of high praise.

As such, there is much about this ongoing political drama in the national capital that is yet to unfold. For both AAP and its principal rival, the BJP, how they frame their political narrative now on would shape the contours of their respective poll-strategy for the Delhi Assembly election; whenever it is scheduled by the Election Commission.

Challenges galore

For Atishi, the journey ahead as chief minister, irrespective of its presently indeterminate but certainly brief life, won’t be without its share of challenges. Shortly after she was chosen by AAP MLAs as Kejriwal’s successor, the suave Kalkaji MLA who, until then held over a dozen portfolios in the Delhi government, outlined her two priorities.

Asserting that “there is only one chief minister of Delhi and that is Arvind Kejriwal”, Atishi said her first priority is to spend her brief stint in office ensuring that her party chief returns to the chief minister’s throne after the Delhi elections. Her second priority would be to ensure that Delhiites continue to benefit from the AAP government’s largesse despite hurdles created by the LG and the BJP.

Meteoric rise to power

That Atishi’s first priority reflects a high degree of sycophancy for her party chief is, perhaps, of little consequence here as it is sycophancy that, in no small measure, contributed to her meteoric rise in AAP and its government. From once being benched as her party’s spokesperson to now emerging as Delhi’s chief minister-designate, Atishi has, indeed, travelled far. She has ridden high on the confidence that Kejriwal reposed in her after the short-lived hiccups in the immediate aftermath of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan’s unceremonious exit from the party nearly a decade ago and her own electoral setback in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Moving forward, the journey is only expected to get tougher. Both as an individual and as the face of AAP’s Delhi government, Atishi will have to counter the smear campaign that the BJP launched against her immediately after her elevation was confirmed.

Power maze Atishi has to navigate

Her long-abandoned commitment to the political philosophy of Marx and Lenin – she had famously adopted Marlena as her last name as tribute to the two communist icons and equally famously dropped it when she made her unsuccessful electoral debut in 2019 from the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat, ostensibly for fear of being taken for a Christian or a Communist – and the long forgotten advocacy by her parents for commuting the death sentence of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru (hanged in 2013), have been resurrected by the BJP and AAP’s rebel MP, Swati Maliwal, to somehow taint her present.

As the Delhi government’s top executive, Atishi will have to navigate the national capital’s treacherous power maze, hoodwinking the LG-controlled bureaucracy, the LG himself as well as the BJP. These three interlinked challenges are only expected to aggravate as the Delhi elections draw close and how Atishi manoeuvres through them, undoubtedly under the supervision of Kejriwal, would determine AAP’s victory prospects as much as Kejriwal’s own success in revitalising his party and mobilising its support base while countering the taints of corruption and running the government through a ‘rubber stamp chief minister’.

Kejriwal’s gambit put to test

It would also be interesting to see how well the AAP is able to sell its gambit of raucously admitting before the Delhi voters that Atishi’s new job is only a temporary assignment. In any other political landscape, Kejriwal’s move could have easily been painted in myriad revolting hues – self-preservation, using the ‘woman card’ for electoral expediency, installing a puppet chief minister, letting slide the chance of giving Delhi its first Dalit-woman chief minister (Rakhi Birla, the third-term Mongolpuri MLA and deputy Speaker of Delhi Assembly was a hopeful contender), and so on.

Some, if not all, of these charges may still come flying thick and fast from the AAP’s rivals but by all accounts, the party seems to have, for now, succeeded in selling its gamble to the Delhi voters. The upfront admission of Atishi being a Kejriwal proxy in the chief minister’s chair is being showcased by the AAP as an assurance that the man, who ushered in a major facelift of Delhi’s education and public health infrastructure and gave them “muft bijli, muft paani” (free electricity and free water), isn’t abandoning them, but is putting his political fate back into their hands.

Woman card

The choice of a woman successor is also meant to gloss over any loss of confidence, no matter how miniscule, among women voters who may have felt let down by the party in the aftermath of Maliwal’s serious allegations against Kejriwal and his confidant Bibhav Kumar while also making up for the AAP’s failure to include women in the state cabinet between 2015 and 2023.

The BJP may fret and fume over the turn of events but it will need to come up with more than a smear campaign against Atishi or its tirade against Kejriwal and the AAP over the Excise Policy case to launch an electorally productive counter-strike if it hopes to wrest power in Delhi after a 26-year gap. For now, Kejriwal appears to hold all the cards at this table of cunning political gambles.