Creator of world-class Delhi falls silent

NEW DELHI: One of the tallest leaders of the Congress, Sheila Dikshit had the distinction of being Delhi’s longest serving chief minister who gave the national capital its modern look. A warm and affable politician, she was a loyalist of the Gandhi family. She was handpicked by Rajiv Gandhi to be part of his council of ministers after he became the Prime Minister in 1984. She represented the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat then.

For her, politics was not only about jousting for power but also about bonding with people and getting re-energised in the process. In her first ever interview after replacing late veteran leader H.K.L. Bhagat as the Delhi Congress chief in mid-nineties, she told this reporter that her main aim in politics was to reach out to people so that their voices was not suppressed.

And after she took over as the chief minister of Delhi in 1998, again in her first interview she told this reporter that her priority would be to involve people in her day-to-day governance. Thus was born the Delhi government’s flagship programme “Bhagidhari” in which Resident Welfare Associations were given powers to take decisions about the development of their respective areas. The scheme also provided platform for the citizens to get on-the-spot redressal of their grievances.

Born in Kapurthala in Punjab to a non-political family in 1938, Dikshit did her schooling from Convent of Jesus and Mary School in the capital and graduated from Miranda House, University of Delhi. She was married in July 1962 to bureaucrat Vinod Dikshit, whose father Uma Shankar Dikshit was a loyalist of Jawaharlal Nehru and served as a minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet in 1971 and later became Governor of Karnataka and West Bengal.

Dikshit stepped in to assist her father-in-law and was noticed by Indira Gandhi, who nominated her first as a member of the Indian delegation to the UN Commission on status of women. First elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984 from Kannauj of Uttar Pradesh, she served as a minister under Rajiv Gandhi, first as the minister of state for parliamentary affairs and later as minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office.

In 1989, she lost the elections from Kannauj. Dikshit spent years in wilderness after Rajiv Gandhi’s death and returned to the mainstream only after Sonia became the party chief. She was also projected as chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh, ahead of 2017 Assembly polls, but had to withdraw after the Congress tied up with the Samajwadi Party. She also served as governor of Kerala from 2013-14.

As the longest serving woman chief minister who ruled the city state for three consecutive terms from 1998 to 2013, Dikshit ushered in an era of all-round development that transformed Delhi into a world-class capital. She also initiated green reforms in public transport sector successfully accomplishing the shift from polluting vehicles to a CNG based fleet.

Known for a string of development works throughout her 15-year stint as chief minister, she fastened the flagship Delhi Metro project, oversaw the creation of a network of flyovers in a city stressed with high population density and heavy traffic and also led the phasing out of killer blue line buses, that had claimed a large number of lives on the roads.

Wanted to quit in 2012 but stayed on due to Nirbhaya incident: Sheila Dikshit

In the winter of 2012, Sheila Dikshit underwent her second angioplasty after doctors confirmed a 90 per cent blockage in her right coronary artery. Her family wanted her to quit politics.

“My family told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to put health concerns before everything else. My decision to resign was almost certain. Moreover, with a year to go for the Assembly election, the party had enough time to find an alternative,” Dikshit wrote in her autobiography, Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life.

But as she slowly recovered her strength and prepared to inform the high command of her decision to step down, the country was shaken to the core on December 16, 2012, as the young woman — later named Nirbhaya by the media — was brutally raped by a gang of men in a moving bus. It was then that she made up her mind not to “run away from the battlefield.”

“After the Nirbhaya incident, I was in a bind. My family urged me to step down as planned earlier. But, I felt that such a move would be seen as running away from the battlefield. The Centre had not wanted the blame to fall on it directly and I, knowing well that our government would be blamed by the Opposition, decided to take it on the chin. Someone had to take the blame,” she wrote.