Quitting the civil services for politics is one leap; making a success of it is another.
Former IAS officer Divya Mittal, who launched her party Jan Neeti Bharat on Thursday after finding “no intent” in the system, is the latest bureaucrat to take that route.
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One is a national party chief, one is a member of Parliament, one is still waiting for the Centre to process his resignation, one is building a new political movement, and one has returned to government service. Her reason is personal and specific, and so are those of the officers who went before her. Kejriwal is the benchmark. Senthil took the opposite route and joined a party that already had a machine. He now sits in Parliament and heads the Congress’s National War Room, and he credits the organisation for his win. His reason was disagreement. In his resignation letter he cited differences with the national leadership over political strategy in Tamil Nadu, and reports link the break to the BJP’s alliance and seat-sharing choices in the recent Assembly elections.
The Indian Revenue Service officer resigned in 2006 to devote himself to activism, the same year he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his work on the right to information. Six years later, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party out of an anti-corruption movement that targeted the UPA government, and the AAP won 67 of 70 Delhi seats in 2015, about 96 per cent. He served as chief minister until 2024, and the party lost power in the capital in 2025. The 2009-batch Karnataka cadre IAS officer resigned in 2019, saying the building blocks of democracy were being compromised, according to reports at the time. He worked with grassroots groups first, joined the Congress in November 2020, ran its war room in the 2023 Karnataka campaign and later its national one, and won Tiruvallur in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. He joined the Congress on October 13, 2025, saying, “I realized that only the Congress could lead this country in the right direction. The government accepted the withdrawal of his resignation in April 2022 and reinstated him in the service, making his the only case among the five in which an officer went back.
“Everything was available, but there was no intent,” Mittal said of her 13 years in the service, explaining a resignation that took effect on September 15 and a party that she says will contest the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. “It was the cadre who campaigned and the people who blessed me,” Senthil said after the result. Last year he fasted over ₹ 2,152 crore in Samagra Shiksha funds withheld for Tamil Nadu, saying “no one should politicise education”. He is a party member, but he said in a March post that the Centre has not processed his resignation in over six years, leaving him without salary or release and, he says, unable to contest. He calls the delay “pure harassment”, and the Centre has not publicly explained it in the reports reviewed. The BJP’s national president accepted the resignation, and Annamalai said he wanted to leave with respect. He later said the resignation did “more harm than good” and called the phase “chasing a chimera”.
