AAP’s founding member and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s trusted lieutenant Manish Sisodia is set to be part of the state government again.
Sisodia, who held several key portfolios including finance and education in the last government, is credited with transforming the government-run schools in the city in the last five years by building better infrastructure and introducing new subjects such as IT and financial markets into the syllabus and also in bringing transparency in the admission process in private schools.
As Delhi’s finance minister, he doubled the budgetary allocation to education and also gave special emphasis on health services.
The AAP leader also brought out a book — ‘Shiksha: My Experiments as an Education Minister’ — tracing their story of changing the face of government schools in Delhi.
However, it was not an easy electoral victory for Sisodia this time around.
While his party marched sure-footed towards a landslide victory in the Assembly polls as per the early trends on the counting day on February 11, uncertainty loomed for several hours over the fate of Sisodia following a nail-biting contest in his Patparganj constituency.
Sisodia, who was seeking re-election from Patparganj for the third time, trailed by about thousand votes behind BJP’s Ravinder Singh Negi, a political greenhorn, for several rounds. The Delhi Deputy Chief Minister finally won the seat, though by a relatively narrow margin of just around 3,000-odd votes.
This must have come as a surprise for AAP, some of whose candidates won by over 70,000 votes. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal himself won his seat by a margin of over 21,000 votes.
Sisodia got a total of 70,163 votes out of 1,42,246 in the constituency which comes in the East Delhi Lok Sabha where BJP’s Gautam Gambhir scored a victory in 2019 Lok Sabha polls by a huge margin. In 2015 Delhi Assembly elections, Sisodia had won by a margin of 28,791 votes when he defeated BJP’s Vinod Kumar Binny.
A close confidant of Kejriwal, Sisodia will again take oath as a minister today at Ramlila Maidan here.
A journalist before entering public life, Sisodia came into limelight during Anna Hazare’s Lokpal movement in 2011.
One of the founding members of AAP, Sisodia played a crucial role in building the narrative in favour of his party that ultimately ensured its third stint in power.
While he served as the Deputy Chief Minister, along with holding several key portfolios including that of education, finance and planning, waits to be seen if he will get to retain the same or CM Kejriwal will entrust him with some new responsibilities.
