The applause rang loud when the 61-year-old lawyer walked over to the velvet-covered stand to read from the loose papers that were strewn about.
He smiled sweetly and waved pleasantly to the galleries above before repeating the same words that nearly 49 other legislators ahead of him had just said.
Dressed in a dark blue safari suit, S.K. Bagga, the man who coolly defeated Kiran Bedi in the February 7 polls, took oath as legislator of Krishna Nagar – an East Delhi area that had been in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s pocket for five terms now.
Mr. Bagga went on to shake Pro-tem Speaker Fateh Singh’s hand, acknowledged the three opposition members from the BJP before making his way back to a green-cushioned chair in the Delhi Vidhan Sabha.
He briefly stood up again to shake hands with colleagues sitting to his left and right. Among the men, many wore khadi kurtas and Nehru jackets, to fit into their new roles as first-time legislators, and a small Indian flag was pinned neatly next to a button.
This sign of camaraderie was evident among all the Aam Aadmi Party legislators who made Monday’s first session of the sixth Delhi Legislative Assembly seem like a celebration. To help ‘Team AAP’ were men, women and children who occupied the galleries above clutching cream-coloured admit cards but not following any of the seven instructions that were enumerated at the back. They did not remain silent whilst the House was sitting, they applauded and shouted each time a legislator took oath and movement was anything but restricted. Some even stood on the wooden handles of chairs till the top of their heads hit the newly-white washed ceiling.
Below in the ‘arena’, three former Delhi Ministers Rakhi Birla, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Somnath Bharti, sat together on a bench, just right of benches they occupied the last time the AAP formed government in Delhi. Ms. Birla swiped through photos on her phone, Mr. Bharadwaj sat stiffly in between his colleagues and Mr. Bharti lent a copy of the oath in English to his colleague: Bijwasan MLA Col. Devender Sehrawat.
“Ye hamare ghar aye the chunav se pehle,” commented someone from the gallery just before Col. Sehrawat dressed in a green shirt and cargo pants took to the stand to take oath with Army-styled diction.
In the oath-taking ceremony that lasted close to an hour and a half, the AAP legislators had fallen into a predictable circuit that involved shaking hands with Mr. Singh, acknowledging the Opposition and signing the register to acknowledge their position. Yet, in between all this, nearly every AAP MLA stopped to shake hands or hug a man with a bright-yellow pagdi who sat in the Lieutenant-Governor’s gallery just left of the speaker’s chair. Bhagwat Mann, the AAP’s Member of Parliament from Sangrur, one of the party’s star campaigners smiled broadly, applauded loudly and even stood up to applaud after Karawal Nagar MLA Kapil Mishra took oath in Sanskrit. In the visitor’s stands, Mr. Mishra’s mother Annapurna, former Mayor from East Delhi and a BJP leader, silently watched.
