Atishi will take additional charge of the Finance, Revenue and Planning departments in the Delhi government, with officials at Raj Niwas saying that Lieutenant Governor (L-G) Vinai Kumar Saxena had approved Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s proposal to this effect. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) alleged Saxena was sitting on the file related to the reshuffling of portfolios for the “past four days”, even as L-G House officials maintained that the signed file had been sent to the Delhi government on Wednesday and the decision was expected to be notified Friday. After the notification, Atishi, the sole woman in the seven-member Delhi Cabinet, will have the largest number — 12 — of portfolios under her belt. The reshuffle also places her a notch below Kejriwal in the cabinet. Other significant departments that Atishi holds include Public Works, Education and Power. Before he resigned following his arrest, former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia held 18 portfolios. He and former cabinet colleague Satyendar Jain, who is also in jail in a graft case and had resigned in February, were replaced by Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj. Their official houses were also allotted to Atishi and Bharadwaj. According to sources, senior party leaders decided to make the change owing to delays in clearing several files in the finance and revenue departments, including those related to disbursement of salaries to civil defence volunteers. Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva, meanwhile, alleged the AAP government’s hurry to get the proposal cleared was what had triggered its attempt to “spread a lie” regarding the L-G withholding it. The Delhi BJP also questioned why senior ministers Gopal Rai, Kailash Gahlot and Imran Hussain were ignored in favour of the “junior-most minister of the cabinet”. Sachdeva also alleged the rejig was the result of “political pressure” exerted by Sisodia in favour of his “political prodigy”. Atishi, 42, who has been brought up in Delhi, attended Springdales School and went on to study history at St Stephen’s College. She then went to Oxford University for her Masters in history on a Chevening scholarship and joined the Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. She was appointed as an adviser to Sisodia in 2015, a stint that lasted three years, after which the Ministry of Home Affairs raised an objection to the appointment of 10 advisers, saying that proper procedure was not followed in that regard. The party fielded her as its Lok Sabha candidate from East Delhi during the 2019 general elections. She lost to BJP’s Gautam Gambhir. A year later, she won the Delhi Assembly seat from Kalkaji.
