Vijender is speaker as assembly begins work

The first day of the eighth Delhi assembly kicked off on Monday with ceremonial oath-taking by all 70 newly elected MLAs and the election of three-time MLA Vijender Gupta as speaker, but an uproar over allegations that portraits of national icons were removed from the chief minister's office triggered a bitter war of words that set the tone for the Capital's new political landscape.

- Alok KN Mishra

The real flashpoint is expected on Tuesday when the BJP government tables 14 pending Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) reports that the party says allegedly details financial irregularities during AAP's tenure.

Chief minister Rekha Gupta was the first to take her oath, followed by her six cabinet ministers Parvesh Verma, Ashish Sood, Manjinder Singh Sirsa, Kapil Mishra, Pankaj Singh and Ravinder Indraj Singh.

While most ministers opted for Hindi, environment minister Sirsa took his oath in Punjabi, and tourism minister Mishra chose Sanskrit.

The ceremony, presided over by pro-tem speaker Arvinder Singh Lovely, saw MLAs pledging in six different languages-Hindi, English, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Maithili.

The session, in which the BJP sits in the treasury benches for the first time in 27 years, was stark in how seating arrangements changed. AAP leaders who for a decade sat to the right of the speaker's chair switched sides with their BJP counterparts. And some former AAP legislators, including Kailash Gahlot and Kartar Singh Tanwar, were now seated with their new BJP colleagues.

After the lunch break, BJP's Vijender Gupta from the Rohini constituency was elected unopposed as speaker.

Gupta, 62, is a third time MLA from Rohini, and has served as the leader of opposition between 2015 to 2020, and between June 2024 to 2025. He was among the only three MLAs from the BJP who were elected in 2015. In the 2025 elections, Gupta defeated his AAP rival by over 37,000 votes.