New Delhi: The year was 2016 and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had swept the Delhi Assembly polls the previous year, winning 67 of 70 seats. This was when Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal inducted Rajendra Pal Gautam, then a first-time MLA from Seemapuri, into his cabinet.
While Gautam, 54, was not the AAP’s first choice as the ‘Dalit face’ of the Kejriwal Cabinet, he managed to handle multiple portfolios including Social Welfare and SC & ST welfare — all the while maintaining a low-profile.
Gautam, a member of the AAP’s national executive, resigned as a minister in the Delhi government Sunday after his presence at an event in Karol Bagh last week triggered a political controversy.
Videos surfaced of Gautam attending the event on 5 October where he, alongside Ambedkar’s great-grandnephew Rajratna Ambedkar, was seen repeating the ‘22 vows’ Ambedkar prescribed to his followers at an event in Nagpur in 1956 after converting from Hinduism to Buddhism.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused Gautam of allegedly ‘denouncing Hinduism’ by taking an oath to ‘boycott’ Hindu deities and demanded his resignation. Delhi BJP leaders also accused the AAP of ‘hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus’.
In his resignation, Gautam wrote that he attended the event in his personal capacity and not as an AAP member or a minister. He also accused the BJP of doing “dirty politics” over the issue, adding that he decided to step down keeping his party’s best interests in mind.
“Over the last few years, he [Gautam] has attended many such events across India but it has never been a political issue,” said a senior AAP leader who did not wish to be named.
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‘Hardcore Ambedkarite’
A lawyer by profession, Gautam is known to those in his inner circle as a Dalit rights activist, a hardcore Ambedkarite and an avid reader. The two-time MLA is a Buddhist and founder of the NGO ‘Mission Jai Bheem’, which helped organise the 5 October event.
“Mr Gautam is a hardcore Ambedkarite,” said the AAP leader mentioned earlier, adding that the former minister has many bookshelves dedicated solely to Ambedkar’s writings at his residence.
Gautam, who won by a margin of 48,821 votes in 2015, not only retained the Seemapuri seat — located in the northeastern peripheries of Delhi — in 2020 but widened his margin of victory to 56,108.
Unlike most of the AAP’s top leadership, Gautam was not part of the 2011 India Against Corruption (IAC) movement and joined the party only in 2014. He won the assembly polls the next year and was inducted into the Kejriwal Cabinet in 2016 with the charge of social welfare, SC & ST welfare, gurdwara elections and registrar cooperative societies.
The Delhi Cabinet has seven ministerial berths, of which one is reserved for a person hailing from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe categories.
However, Gautam was not Arvind Kejriwal’s first choice.
After the AAP’s thumping victory in 2015, Kejriwal chose Sandeep Kumar for the reserved cabinet berth, giving him charge of portfolios including social welfare, SC/ST welfare and women & child development. While Kumar, unlike Gautam, had known Kejriwal since the IAC days, the MLA from Sultanpur Majra fell out of favour with the AAP leadership after a controversial video of him surfaced in August 2016.
“Next choice for the ministerial position was Rakhi Birla, who too, was associated with the AAP leadership since the Anna [Hazare] movement days. But earlier in the same year, she was made the Delhi deputy speaker. Boss [Kejriwal] then decided to give Rajendra Pal Gautam a chance and he did really well in the portfolios given to him,” said a senior AAP leader.
‘Asset to AAP’
In 2019, Gautam went on to become the main force behind one of the flagship projects of the AAP government in Delhi — the Jai Bhim Mukhyamantri Pratibha Vikas Yojana. The scheme is essentially a scholarship for students from marginalised backgrounds to help them enrol in leading coaching centres to prepare for a wide range of competitive exams pertaining to the fields of medical and engineering, among others.
A second Delhi-based senior AAP functionary, who did not wish to be named, said Gautam has “very good connections with Dalit groups and civil right groups across India” along with “leadership qualities”.
“That way, he is an asset because more than 20 per cent of Delhi’s population are people belonging to the Dalit community. He played an active role during election campaigns in Delhi as well as in other states including Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh,” the functionary told ThePrint.
While the AAP swept the Punjab elections in March, it failed to bag even a single seat in either Uttarakhand or Uttar Pradesh. The party is now working to expand its footprint in the poll-bound states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.
With Gautam’s resignation, the AAP is now left grappling with the question of whether his exit from the cabinet could hurt the party’s electoral prospects among Dalit voters in poll-bound states.
“We have assessed such scenarios in the past while keeping a safe distance from religious issues. Our idea is to create a separate space that is based on development, welfare, jobs, better living, etc. That is what we think primarily matters to people,” said another senior AAP leader.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
(An earlier version of this report referred to Rajratna Ambedkar as Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s great-grandson)
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