Full disclosure: Akshay Marathe is National Joint Secretary of the Aam Aadmi Party. He currently works with the Delhi Government on education policy and has closely worked with Atishi Marlena.

The Aam Aadmi Party declared Atishi as the prabhari of the East Delhi Lok Sabha constituency in June this year. On August 27, during the inauguration of Atishi’s Lok Sabha office, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the next Minister of Parliament of East Delhi will be working out of this office. It is no secret now that she will be contesting the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

Atishi’s identity within and outside the party has been that of an academic and policymaker, who has helped transform Delhi’s government schools in her capacity as advisor to the education minister (a post also held by Sisodia). The only reason she was in the news earlier this year was for her dismissal by the Centre from her “one-rupee” salary job.

This time, she made headlines for dropping her second name “Marlena”.

Critics are making two accusations: one, the name was dropped because it was “Christian-sounding”; and two, the party asked Atishi to drop the name. The second accusation has absolutely no truth to it. In fact, some in the party were surprised to find she was not a Christian, after Atishi’s name had been cleared. She had been chosen because of her work in government schools, and because that work had created a degree of name and face recognition among a section of people.

Marlena is a name Atishi’s parents derived from their ideological icons, Marx and Lenin. It has no meaning in the Indian context and sounds European. As soon as Atishi was declared the prabhari for East Delhi, posters of “Shikshit Rashtr, Samarth Rashtr (Educated India, Capable India)” started going up across the East Delhi Lok Sabha constituency. They had pictures of Atishi—with the name “Marlena”—and Manish Sisodia in them. After these posters began surfacing in June, a whisper campaign was initiated, with the refrain being: “Aap ko pata hai zhadu walon ne videshi ko ticket diya hai (Do you know the Aam Aadmi Party has given a ticket to a foreigner)?”

It is indeed possible that videshi was a euphemism for “Christian”. Almost every day, members of her team would get questions from people inside and outside the party’s organisation, such as: “Ma’am baahar se hai kya? Humare yahan Bhajapayi keh rahe hai (Is ma’am an outsider? Local BJP workers have been spreading this.)”

This was a serious problem. Our entire platform had been about education and schools, but the issue of identity was distracting people from that.

We had to take a call—either we nip this issue in the bud, or spend the rest of the campaign fighting fake news generated by the WhatsApp University. Atishi said internally, “We are fighting this battle to prove that elections can be fought and won on the issue of education. We cannot afford to waste time and energy in clarifying issues of identity when we could be talking about schools. I have decided to drop Marlena from my name.”

Some believe this is a betrayal of the AAP’s promise to change politics. But is it? The AAP has made an effort to project an educated, independent woman, who has earned herself a reputation as a top-notch policymaker, who has no former electoral experience and almost no personal wealth.

Until The Print story came out, Atishi had never disclosed that she was a Punjabi Kshatriya—although the story calls her a Punjabi Rajput. None of us were aware that she was actually Atishi Singh. She has, however, made it clear she is not interested in using the caste name “Singh”, which would have given her an advantage among Punjabi Kshatriyas. Instead, she has chosen to drop a part of her name that had become an integral part of her identity for the last 37 years. If this is what it takes to give the BJP a serious fight and ensure the focus remains on the issues Atishi is passionate about, it is a sacrifice she is willing to make.

Some are comparing this with the election of George Fernandes, who could win an election in Bihar way back in 1977. It was a time when politics was exclusively for upper-caste males, with few exceptions. Fernandes was a Mangalorean Catholic, a community that proudly claims upper-caste lineage. The communally polarised environment of the post-2014 India makes it easy for the BJP to spread falsehoods about people and religions. This kind of politics cannot be fought on their battlefield. Communal politics can be beaten by politics of economic progressivism, hope and optimism.

Electoral politics is not merely about making a point and being martyred for the choices we make. It is about winning, and representing the society we are living in. Atishi has been able to do what she did in the last 3 years for Delhi’s government schools because Arvind Kejriwal won 67 seats out of 70 in 2015.

Politics is a means of change, only for those who know how to win. We know how to win and we have the stomach to take flak for our decisions. Now that Atishi’s name and identity questions are in the past, she will focus on talking about AAP’s work in education and healthcare.