Lunch with BS: Atishi Marlena on Delhi govt's battle to revive its schools

Marlena tells how the Delhi government's remarkable engagement with sarkari schools has been sustained in a politically fraught environment

“You’re not vegetarian, are you?” asks Atishi Marlena, scanning the menu at Cafe Lota. “Oh no,” I say, “but I thought you might be.” When I struggle to explain why her lean face, no-nonsense haircut and simple salwar kurta suggest, well, frugality, she cuts me short with a quick laugh, one that rings out more often than I would have expected. “I know,” she says, “my friends tell me I give off vegan vibes.” 

We go on to order a mostly carnivorous spread on a muggy day that desperately needs lifting with a good meal. Marlena, who has eaten before at this bamboo-roofed café within Delhi’s Crafts Museum, enthusiastically recommends two starters, keema pao and sabudana wada, and readily agrees to my suggestion of prawns cooked with raw mango and mutton curry. Watching her quiz our waiter about chutneys, I note her zest and her eye for detail. Minutes later she has moved us to another table, away from whirring coolers so that my recorder doesn’t pick up their sound, and had my dirty table mat replaced. I am beginning to realise what it must feel like to be a school principal encountering this pleasantly capable 37-year old for the first time. 

Marlena is an intriguing political personality. Like others in the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), she was once a social activist — but  also an academic over-achiever. A Rhodes scholar, she was meant to do a Phd in education at Oxford but returned with a master’s instead because “high-level academics cuts you off from the here and now”. She went on to spend five years in a village near Bhopal in a Gandhian quest “to bring grassroots change from below” before being convinced that “scale and policy is only possible with politics”. Her parents, Delhi university professors and Left activists who meshed Marx and Lenin to coin “Marlena”, were unfazed by her experimental journey. I get a vivid snapshot of her atypical upbringing when she remarks, as we devour our deliciously deep fried starters, that they would have been far more worried “had I taken up a corporate job”. 

Today, Marlena, appointed prabhari (in charge) of the East Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, amid speculation that she will contest this seat in next year’s general election, comes across as an ardent practitioner of urban politics, living and breathing bijli-pani, health and education, and an idealist whose faith in AAP’s “alternative” vision has survived its erratic trajectory. Some see this incisive but poised party spokeswoman as an exception in a “strident”, “disorderly” party, but the distinction is superficial —  she radiates a stubborn determination that is very AAP. Rukmini Banerji, CEO of the education non-profit Pratham, notes that the duo of Delhi’s deputy chief minister (and education minister) Manish Sisodia and Marlena have “taken on every kind of establishment, on the right, the left, pedagogic, bureaucratic”, in their work on education, from regulating private school fees to addressing dismal learning levels at government schools. Of Marlena, she said: “Her role has been absolutely critical. She thrives on it, and despite obstacles, just goes on.”  

As our prawns and mutton arrive with lacy appams and steaming rice, Marlena is animatedly discussing school toilets. “When you can smell the toilet from the school gate,” she says, “the message to children is that they don’t matter and only kids in shiny schools will make it; to teachers that they have no obligation to teach.” Transforming the appalling physical reality of government schools, from enforcing the use of phenyl and Harpic to introducing smart-boards, swimming pools and libraries, has been fundamental, she tells me, to “changing culture and mindsets”.

I have visited classrooms abuzz during the summer holidays with Mission Buniyaad, the latest in a series of campaigns to bring children struggling with the basics to grade level, and read AAP’s exultant tweets on government schools’ exceptional class 12 board exam results. At lunch, though Marlena, strikes a reflective note. “We’ve come a long way in giving government school children the education they deserve,” she says, “but there is a still a learning crisis in our schools.” 

She briskly walks me through a dense thicket for 20 minutes — malfunctioning municipal controlled primary schools “that send us children in grade six without teaching them to read or write”, the disastrous no-detention policy that leads to a high drop out rate in grade nine, the effectiveness of  regrouping children by scholastic ability… I find myself far better educated, but panting a little, as she stops to take a call. It turns out to be bijli-pani politics. Her irate mother, she says with a grin, wants a refund for power cuts. 

As our conversation turns — how could it not? — to the Arvind Kejriwal government’s existentialist battles with the Modi government, Delhi’s Lt Governor and the bureaucracy, I quiz Marlena on the challenges of delivering results in a politically fraught environment; one that even saw the Centre divest her in April of her official job (for a token monthly salary of rupee one) as Sisodia’s advisor on education. 

“My blood boils,” she replies, in a voice calmer than her words, “when I think of how much more we could have done in these three-and-half years.” Nibbling on a piece of raw mango, she catalogues stalled initiatives, from paralysed teacher recruitment to a proposal for iPads for teachers (to make record keeping easier) “going around in circles between the education, finance and IT departments for over 20 months”. 

I hear her trying to be fair to individual bureaucrats, noting that some IAS officers were committed to education, and others faced political pressure, but when I ask whether AAP’s ways unsettle the bureaucracy, her distaste for a class  she describes as “lacking accountability”comes through. “The current method by which the bureaucracy is settled,” she says drily, “isn’t leading to outcomes that are in the interests of the people.”

Political will has made the big difference in education, Marlena argues: A 25 per cent budgetary allocation, Sisodia himself stepping into hundreds of schools, a determined reaching out to “some outstanding principals and teachers”, putting parents on school management committees, partnering NGOs. “We had our ear firmly to the ground,” she says, “and we involved the community. That’s how we pushed change in a very adverse situation.”

“It almost feels like a government has been formed once again,” Marlena declares, when I ask if the July 4 Supreme Court judgement asserting the primacy of Delhi’s elected government over the LG (except in three areas) has made an immediate impact, notwithstanding the continuing acrimony with the Centre over control of services. “The doorstep delivery of rations is finally coming through,” she says, “yesterday we approved the construction of 12,000 classrooms.” The judgment will impact Parliamentary elections, she asserts: “A message has gone out loud and clear that the LG wasn’t letting this government work.”

As we sip “single estate” coffee lacking in the promised notes of “banana to wild berry”, we talk about her forays into East Delhi, where she has been organising ward committees peopled with volunteers who she hyperbolically claims “are willing to do anything to change this country” and signature campaigns to support AAP’s full-throated electoral war-cry of full statehood for Delhi. Is she excited, I ask, that she might be contesting a general election next year. She laughs and replies, “We will see about that, I am okay either way. It may sound hard to believe, but I am agnostic about my specific role in the party.” It is hard to believe, I reply (because she seems so ready for the next leg). Laughing again, she insists, “It’s true!”