From Marxist upbringing to ‘soft Hindutva’: The rise of new Delhi CM Atishi

New Delhi, India – It was the middle of April 2022, and spring was still giving way to summer. But India’s capital was on edge.

Jahangirpuri, a neighbourhood in the northern peripheries of Delhi, was tense after an altercation between groups of Hindu and Muslim men over a Hindu religious procession during which slogans against Muslims were chanted.

Days later, bulldozers rolled into the neighbourhood and tore down several structures close to a local mosque as part of an anti-encroachment drive by the city’s civic body, controlled at the time by the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

While a court order forced the civic authority to stop the demolitions, three top leaders of Delhi’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) held a news conference in which they blamed Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingya – both predominantly Muslim communities – for the riots.

BJP leaders had also pinned the blame on the same communities. Both the parties, otherwise opposed to each other, were seemingly in synchrony over whom they blamed for the violence: vulnerable Muslim communities.

For AAP, it was legislator and spokesperson Atishi, who took the lead at the news conference. In her cotton saree, short hair and thick rimless glasses, Atishi had emerged as a major face of the party in Delhi by then.

Many critics weren’t surprised by the AAP’s attempts – only the latest by that point – to pander to Hindu votes in a bid to compete with the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian thrust.

But it was a defining moment in the public image of Atishi, a relative political upstart, who, through most of her life, had carried a curious last name: “Marlena”, a portmanteau of philosopher Karl Marx and the man who built the first communist state, Vladimir Lenin.

On Tuesday, the 43-year-old Atishi was named the chief minister-designate of India’s capital territory of Delhi, two days after AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal announced he would resign from his office in the wake of corruption allegations against him in a case related to his government’s policy on the sale of liquor.

Kejriwal was arrested in March by India’s federal agency that probes financial crimes and was released from jail last week after the country’s top court granted him bail. His former deputy Manish Sisodia was also arrested in the same case and has been out on bail for a month now.

Proposing Atishi as his replacement at a meeting with his party’s legislators, Kejriwal said he would only return to the office after winning people’s trust through a regional vote, due in February next year.

Third woman to lead capital

Atishi will be the third woman chief minister of Delhi after Sushma Swaraj of the BJP and Sheila Dikshit of the Congress party.

Other than Atishi, who is yet to take the oath of office, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, who governs the eastern state of West Bengal, is the only other woman chief minister in India at the moment. Both Atishi and Banerjee are members of the INDIA opposition alliance, led by the Indian National Congress.

But unlike Banerjee, Swaraj or Dikshit, who spent years in politics before they took the top position in their states, Atishi’s has been a meteoric rise, in a short career spanning social work and politics.

The daughter of Vijay Singh and Tripta Wahi, both former professors of history at the University of Delhi, Atishi’s formative years, as a close aide put it, were all about books she was surrounded with and the “in-house classes on socialist revolutions” from around the world, delivered by her Marxist parents.

Her elder sister Rosa Basanti, a social activist, is named after the Polish-German revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxemburg.

“Her parents come from a Marxist revolutionary background but their daughters chose their own paths,” said Tanvir Aeijaz, honorary vice chairman at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism and professor of public policy and politics at the University of Delhi, who has known Atishi’s family for several years now.

After schooling at New Delhi’s prestigious Springdales School, Atishi joined the University of Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, whose illustrious list of alumni includes Congress parliamentarian and India’s main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and former Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq, among others. She also holds two postgraduate degrees in history from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, where she studied on highly competitive scholarships.

On returning to India, Atishi started working in the social development sector in Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India. In 2007, she started a commune with Praveen Singh, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, to whom Atishi was then married. Their work was primarily focused on self-governance in Indian villages.

Around 2010, Atishi met Sisodia, who back then worked in a nonprofit collective with Kejriwal after quitting his job with a television news channel. That led her to join an anticorruption movement which targeted the then Congress-led federal government, and, many political analysts believe, paved the way for the rise of Modi’s BJP in the 2014 general elections.

The AAP was born in 2012 as an offshoot of that movement, making the fight against corruption its central plank. It is also the year Atishi started to gain her foothold within the party but remained mostly behind the scenes.

Ahead of the 2013 Delhi state assembly elections in which AAP made its debut, Atishi was made a member of the party’s manifesto committee. No party won a majority in those elections, but the AAP formed a government with the support of the Congress – a partnership that collapsed soon.

In 2015, after the party stormed back to power winning 67 of 70 assembly seats, she was appointed adviser to Sisodia, the then deputy chief minister who also held the education portfolio.

Atishi’s first brush with electoral politics happened in the 2019 general elections when AAP fielded her against the BJP’s cricketer-turned-politician Gautam Gambhir from the East Delhi parliamentary constituency. She lost and was elected a state legislator in Delhi the next year.

By then, Atishi was regularly addressing news conferences, speaking on important political issues, and aggressively defending her party in TV debates with BJP and Congress spokespersons.

“She is extremely qualified. It is good that someone with such a sound academic background and training has become a chief minister. She can set a good example for others,” Ashutosh, a journalist who was formerly associated with the AAP and goes by a single name, told Al Jazeera.

Delhi’s education reforms

Atishi is often credited with playing a significant role in upgrading Delhi’s crumbling public schools, not just by modernising their infrastructure but also in the quality of education imparted to them.

“The top leadership of the party saw her as a valuable asset, and the public also started to know her,” a senior party leader who did not wish to be identified told Al Jazeera.

AAP leader Akshay Marathe, who worked with Atishi between 2016 and 2019, told Al Jazeera she was “instrumental in spearheading projects aimed at bringing back to life Delhi’s public schools”.

“She is also very skilled in recruiting the right people and training them the right way,” he said.

Improved public schools and healthcare, and welfare schemes, such as water and electricity subsidies – and free bus rides for all women – have helped AAP build its popularity in the city of 20 million residents.

“Atishi’s own approach in politics, as I see it, is welfare-centric. She believes in the upliftment of public institutions for transformation in society and making them competitive with private institutions. Technically, it is not a Marxist or a traditional socialist approach,” historian Aeijaz told Al Jazeera.

In her early years in AAP, Atishi was considered close to psephologist-turned-political activist Yogendra Yadav, one of the main founders of the party. Yadav was expelled from the party in 2015 over ideological differences with Kejriwal.

“It is a positive thing for Delhi and the country that a woman with such a strong background in people’s movement and constructive work has taken over as the chief minister,” Yadav told Al Jazeera.

Dropping surnames and ’embracing Hindutva’

As Atishi’s stature within AAP grew, so did her apparent discomfort at her given last name – Marlena. She still occasionally uses Singh as a last name – the Rajput caste identifier from her father’s name. But she mostly uses only her first name – a decision over which her colleagues in the AAP seem to be divided.

Some AAP leaders believe she was forced to do so due to the attacks by her political opponents on grounds of caste and faith – amid rumours that critics spread that Marlena was a Christian name. Others think a surname like Marlena made little sense politically and was not helping her in connecting with the masses.

But there is a third set of AAP leaders who assert that it was a purely opportunist move she made as a survival strategy in politics. “AAP is not a party that endorses Marxism or socialism. AAP had room for Atishi to grow, but not Marlena,” said a senior AAP leader, requesting anonymity.

In August 2018, she once said at a public event: “Marlena is not my surname. My surname is Singh which I never used. The second name was given by my parents. I have decided to use just Atishi for my election campaign.”

In her campaign for the 2019 national and 2020 regional elections, Atishi did not use Marlena and identified herself with the first name, occasionally using Singh. In her affidavits for the two elections, however, she wrote her full name: Atishi Marlena. Since she became a minister in the Delhi government, the secretariat records only say Atishi.

But her shifting approach on names was also accompanied by her political transition – along with the AAP as a party – towards what experts call ‘soft Hindutva’. Hindutva is the Hindu majoritarian ideology of the BJP and its allies.

In several public events between 2019 and 2020, the years she entered electoral politics, Atishi was seen participating in Astra Puja (worship of weapons) during Navaratri, a major Hindu festival. She also led protests against demolition drives of Delhi’s municipal corporations – then ruled by the BJP but under AAP’s control since December 2022 – that involved Hindu temples.

At the same time, Atishi and her AAP were accused by Delhi’s Muslims – who had supported the party en masse in recent elections – of staying silent on issues affecting the community. Towards the end of 2019, the Modi government passed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which effectively added a religious test to citizenship through naturalisation.

The law fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim minorities from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries – Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan – who entered India as refugees until 2014. The United Nations and rights groups called the law “fundamentally discriminatory”.

The passage of the CAA, and a proposed National Register of Citizens that was intended to complement it, triggered outrage among India’s 200 million Muslims. A weeks-long street sit-in, mainly led by Muslim women, at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood, became the epicentre of the anti-CAA protests. In early 2020, right before the coronavirus pandemic shut the world down, one of these protests was attacked by Hindu mobs, triggering one of the city’s worst religious riots in which more than 50 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. Dozens of Muslims were arrested for the violence, many of them still languishing in jails under serious charges of terrorism and sedition.

Kejriwal blamed “outsiders” for the riots and attacked the BJP, blaming their “politics of hate”, even as he criticised Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for not visiting the riot-hit areas. But Kejriwal himself took more than a week to visit the violence-hit localities in northeast Delhi, even though his government started several relief and rehabilitation centres for the victims.

Top AAP leaders Al Jazeera spoke to said the decision to tilt towards Hindu nationalism was taken at the party’s top level.

“If AAP had to do its development-based and welfare-centric politics, which would help people of all social classes, castes, religion and communities, it would have to remain in power and expand its footprints. For that, it had to develop a strong shield against attacks from the BJP,” said an AAP leader requesting anonymity. “Atishi and others clearly understood the strategy.”

“Sticking to certain values and losing power to the BJP would have helped nobody – neither the AAP nor the people,” the leader added.

Another AAP leader said Muslims in Delhi remain strong supporters of the party because most Muslims are poor and marginalised and have benefitted significantly from AAP’s politics, which stresses on education, healthcare and other welfare measures

Historian Aeijaz, who is a Muslim, however, disagreed with that argument. “AAP cannot take Muslims for granted any more. The Muslim votes seem to be swaying towards the Congress en masse because Rahul Gandhi has emerged as a bigger leader than Arvind Kejriwal as someone who can defeat the BJP,” he said. “Now that Atishi will be the chief minister of Delhi, she should carefully calculate the risks involved in her strategies.”

But Aeijaz said that Atishi’s political positions differ from the personal values she holds. “As far as I know, Atishi, in her personal life, has quite a secular outlook,” he said.

Journalist Ashutosh, who is a vocal critic of the AAP’s embrace of “soft Hindutva”, agreed. “I would not blame her [Atishi] for that. Such decisions are often taken by the top leadership. Atishi is a disciplined foot soldier. Politically, she had no other choice than to toe the line.”

By 2022, the AAP’s footprints appeared to be expanding beyond Delhi. That year, the party came to power in the northern state of Punjab, winning 92 out of 116 seats in the legislative assembly polls. Its candidates won two seats in the coastal state of Goa and five in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where the AAP secured nearly 13 percent of the total votes – a stunning performance for a young party.

But within a year, the party was in crisis. Federal agencies controlled by the BJP initiated probes into Delhi’s excise policy, accusing the AAP of accepting kickbacks from private players and allegedly using the money to fund election campaigns. Sisodia was arrested in February 2023, parliamentarian Sanjay Singh in October 2023, and Kejriwal in March this year.

Satyendar Jain, former health minister of Delhi, has been in jail since May 2022 in connection with a separate money laundering case. Earlier this month, Amanatullah Khan, the AAP legislator from the constituency Shaheen Bagh falls in, was also arrested by federal agencies for alleged money laundering.

The series of arrests appears to have created a crisis of leadership. It was after Sisodia’s arrest that Atishi was inducted into the Delhi cabinet. By July last year, she held 12 crucial portfolios, including education, finance and public works, practically making her the number two in the Kejriwal government.

When Kejriwal was sent to jail in March, her responsibilities increased manifold, according to AAP insiders.

As the new chief minister of Delhi, can Atishi turn the tide for the AAP?

In her first news briefing, after Kejriwal proposed her as his successor, Atishi said: “I want to assure the 20 million residents of Delhi that Kejriwal is their real chief minister … I, as the chief minister till the upcoming elections, shall work with only one objective: making Arvind Kejriwal the chief minister of Delhi once again.”

Whether she can convince Delhi to do that, through her work over the next six months, could determine Atishi’s own political future. The Marlena part of her life? That’s now old history.