For the first time since 1998, the Delhi Government will be without a woman Minister.
None of the six Ministers in the Kejriwal-led government, who were sworn in on Saturday, is a woman. Among them, Sandeep Kumar has been given Women and Child Development, a portfolio held earlier by Mangolpuri MLA Rakhi Bidlan, the lone woman Minister in the last AAP government.
Ms. Bidlan was among the six women candidates fielded by the party, all of whom emerged victorious. The omission of all six from the Council of Ministers was explained by party sources as a “selection call” that does not dilute the stand of the government on women’s issues.
Shalimar Bagh MLA Bandana Kumari is likely to be the next Deputy Speaker.
Since Purnima Sethi, who was part of the Sahib Singh Verma-led Cabinet in the late 1990s, there has been at least one woman Minister in every Delhi Government.
Mr. Verma was succeeded by fellow BJP leader and now Union Minister Sushma Swaraj, who then passed on the baton to Sheila Dikshit in 1998.
Ms. Dikshit not only led the government for three consecutive terms, but also had Kiran Walia as Cabinet colleague.
And even though women’s safety was a key feature in all of his pre-election campaign speeches, Mr. Kejriwal only made a passing reference about the same in his maiden speech as Chief Minister at the Ramlila Maidan on Saturday.
The only two mentions of women’s safety in his speech were when he was assuring traders of better utilisation of their tax money and when he was reminding Prime Minister Narendra Modi that his national duties left little time for him to focus on incidents such as rapes in the Capital.
