Moving on from Name-Change Row & LS Loss, AAP's Atishi Clinches Comfortable Win after Tense Moments

New Delhi: One of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s most prominent faces, Atishi, won from the Kalkaji seat with a comfortable margin of over 10,000 votes.

However, she was trailing in the initial rounds of counting and was ahead with an extremely slim margin of mere seven votes after the fifth round.

Atishi, 38, was pitted against BJP’s Dharambir Singh. She had contested last year's national election but lost to BJP's Gautam Gambhir. For the Delhi Assembly elections, AAP dropped its Kalkaji MLA Avtar Singh Kalka to nominate her.

She had earlier told the media that she chose Kalkaji because a lot of work was done in education in that constituency.

In October 2018, Atishi had changed her name to Atishi Singh from Atishi Marlena in what was alleged was a move to woo caste voters for the last general elections.

However, she said that she had decided to drop her last name ‘Marlena’, ostensibly to counter alleged ‘rumours’ that claimed that she was a Christian or a foreigner. Both the AAP and Atishi had denied that the move had been undertaken in view of ‘caste’ considerations.

Her name-change was reflected for the first time during an event organised by the Kshatriya community in November, 2018, where she was referred as ‘Atishi Singh’.

Atishi was the advisor on education to the AAP-led Delhi government and was among the nine party functionaries who got the dismissal letter in April last year following an advisory from the Union Home Ministry which asserted that the ‘creation’ of these posts had become ‘void’.

Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister, Manish Sisodia has time and again praised Atishi stating she was instrumental in improving the education system in the national capital.

She was also instrumental in shaping the Happiness Curriculum designed to increase the “happiness quality” levels of students. She is said to be involved in strengthening regulations on private school fees and organising parent-teacher meetings, including the largest such meet in Delhi in 2017. As many as 1,041 schools had participated in the meet.

Born to Delhi University professors Vijar Kumar Singh and Tripta Wahi, Atishi did her schooling from Springdales School in New Delhi and studied history at St. Stephen’s College.

She went to Oxford University for her Masters in the same subject on a Chevening scholarship and joined as a Rhodes scholar in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2005.

Having spent some time teaching at Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh earlier, Atishi got involved with organic farming and progressive education systems, when she moved to a small village near Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal.

She worked with several non-profit organisations there, where she casually met some AAP members, including senior Supreme Court lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan who was associated with the party at that time.