‘Special guests’ to share stage with Kejriwal at swearing-in
NEWDELHI:AS a large crowd gathered on the lawns of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) head office in central Delhi’s Deen Dayal Upadhyay road on Saturday afternoon, Geeta Devi adjusted her crisply ironed khaki uniform.
It was the first time she would face the camera.
Devi, a 36-year-old homeguard employed with the Delhi government, is one of the 50 people chosen by the AAP to share stage with Delhi’s chief minister designate Arvind Kejriwal, as he takes oath for the third consecutive time in Ramlila Maidan on Sunday. On Saturday, Devi had come to the party office to collect her special invitation card, when she was swamped by a group of news reporters.
In a first, Delhi chief minister designate Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday will share stage with a group of commoners for his swearing-in — under the banner ‘Delhi ke Nirmata’ (architects of Delhi) – a report on which was published by HT on Saturday.
While Devi helped in the arrest of a pickpocket, her colleague Arun Kumar (22), who is also among the special invitees for the event, had rescued a fouryear-old girl from an abduction attempt in a bus in November. Both Devi and Kumar are among 5,000 new homeguard recruits who have been deployed in buses by the AAP government last year to enhance women security.
The special invitees belong to different walks of life — doctors, teachers, sanitation workers, bus conductors, bus drivers, marshals deployed for women security, auto-rickshaw drivers, farmers, anganwadi workers, athletes, IIT and medical students enrolled under scholarships, PWD engineers, businessmen, mobile ambulance operator, relatives of fire officials and police officials who lost their lives on the line of duty and the chief architect of Signature Bridge Ratan Jamshed Batliboi, among others.
“They are the people who make Delhi what it is. They are the true architects of the city,” senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia said as he elaborated on ‘Delhi ke Nirmata’ in a press conference earlier on Saturday. The AAP, which won a thumping majority of 62 seats in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, is likely to repeat all its ministers in the Cabinet-led by Kejriwal in its third term, senior party leaders indicated. They added that deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and five other ministers would also take oath in Ramlila Maidan. In 2015 too, during the start of its second term, the AAP had organised its oath taking at Ramlila Maidan — the place where the AAP was born out of an anti-corruption movement.
Around 50,000 people are expected to be accommodated inside the ground. As many as 3,000 AAP volunteers will be engaged in crowd management, said a senior AAP leader.