Aam Aadmi Party leader Atishi on Saturday took oath as the chief minister of Delhi.
She became Delhi’s third woman chief minister after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sushma Swaraj and the Congress’ Sheila Dixit.
Atishi also became the seventeenth woman to hold the post of chief minister in independent India. The only other woman chief minister in the country at present is West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee.
Atishi will likely have a brief tenure in office with the Delhi Assembly polls scheduled for February.
Five of her party colleagues were also sworn-in as Cabinet ministers on Thursday by Lieutenant General VK Saxena, namely Gopal Rai, Saurabh Bharadwaj, Kailash Gahlot, Imran Hussain and Mukesh Ahlawat.
On September 17, the Aam Aadmi Party announced that Atishi would be the chief minister till the next Assembly election in the national capital. Later in the day, Kejriwal submitted his resignation as chief minister to Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena.
This came after the party’s national convener Arvind Kejriwal said on September 15 that he would resign from the post in two days and return to it only after voters expressed their support for him.
He also demanded that the next Delhi elections be held in November along with the Maharashtra Assembly polls.
Kejriwal’s statement came after he was released on bail on September 13 in the Delhi liquor policy case.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan granted him bail on the grounds that the chargesheet had been filed in the case and that the trial was unlikely to be completed in the near future.
Kant held that Kejriwal’s prolonged imprisonment constituted an “unjust deprivation of liberty” but maintained that there were no procedural irregularities in his arrest. Bhuyan, however, said that the chief minister’s arrest by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the liquor policy case was unjustified.
The Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate have alleged that the Aam Aadmi Party government modified Delhi’s now-scrapped liquor policy by increasing the commission for wholesalers from 5% to 12%. This allegedly facilitated the receipt of bribes from wholesalers who had a substantial market share and turnover.
Also read: Why has Arvind Kejriwal decided to resign as Delhi chief minister?
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