Atishi to retain 4 ministers in Delhi Cabinet; to induct a new Dalit face

New Delhi: Mukesh Ahlawat, a Dalit MLA, will be the lone new face in new Chief Minister Atishi's cabinet while all the four ministers in the Arvind Kejriwal government will be retained in her team.

Sources said Gopal Rai, Kailash Gahlot, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Imran Hussain, who were part of the Kejriwal cabinet, will take oath along with Atishi on Saturday. With the induction of only one new face, there will be one vacancy in the Delhi cabinet, which can have a maximum of seven ministers, including the Chief Minister.

Ahlawat, a first-time MLA from the SC reserved seat Sultanpur Majra which he won by around 48,000 votes in 2020, will be the Dalit face in the cabinet while Rai belongs to Thakur community, Gahlot is a Jat and Bharadwaj is a Brahmin. Imran Hussain represents Muslim while the Chief Minister-designate is from Punjabi Rajput community.

The oath ceremony is likely to be held at the Raj Niwas and expected to be a low-key affair, as AAP does not want to project a celebratory atmosphere owing to Kejriwal's announcement of resignation from the post.

With two vacancies, the leadership felt that they had the liberty of bringing in freshness and give representation to unrepresented sections of the society. However, the AAP leadership chose to fill only one minister. It brought in a Dalit MLA to the cabinet after Raj Kumar Anand resigned from the party.

Sources said the party leadership decided not to change the four senior ministers as it would have sent a "wrong signal of discontinuity". It also felt that experienced and senior leaders should be part of the cabinet when the party is expecting administrative "roadblocks" being erected in the run up to the Assembly election in the next five months.

For new ministers to get a grip of their assignment would also take time, especially with the Model Code of Conduct to be in place in the last more than a month.

The new Cabinet has its tasks cut out with just five months left for Assembly polls and will have to roll out Mukhyamantri Mahila Samman Yojana, Electric Vehicle Policy 2.0 and doorstep delivery of services among others.

Kejriwal resigned as the Delhi chief minister on Tuesday, after which Atishi staked claim to form a new government in the national capital. Earlier in March 2023 when Manish Sisodia as Deputy Chief Minister had quit after his arrest, Atishi and Bharadwaj were inducted into Kejriwal cabinet.