The political legacy of veteran Congress leader Sheila Dikshit, who was India’s longest serving woman Chief Minister, was best summed up by her one time rival and now Union Minister for Science and Technology, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, who said, “We had our differences on policies but we always admired her behaviour and efficiency.”
“For 15 years, I had the opportunity to work with her in the Assembly as an MLA. We had differences over her policies and programmes and even took out protests. But we always admired her behaviour and efficiency at work,” he said.
It was this efficiency that made Ms. Dikshit the face of a fast-changing Delhi, someone who knew how to change political adversity into opportunity.
The city’s change to cleaner public transport bears testimony to Ms. Dikshit’s efforts. In April 2001, public transport in the national capital had collapsed as nearly 10,000 old and polluting diesel buses were ordered off the roads by the Supreme Court. The Congress government led by her was not ready to replace the fleet with cleaner CNG buses.
Yet, by the next Assembly elections in 2003, Delhi’s change-over to CNG was a success story. Throughout her 15-year tenure, Ms. Dikshit focussed on extending the flagship Delhi Metro project, built a network of flyovers and phased out the killer Blue Line buses.
Unlike the face-off between the Aam Admi Party (AAP)-led Delhi government and the Centre now, Ms. Dikshit always banked on her personal equations when the Union government was headed by BJP stalwart, late Atal Bihari Vajpayee from 1999 to 2003.
Born in Kapurthala in Punjab to a non-political family in 1938, Ms. Dikshit did her schooling from Convent of Jesus and Mary School in the capital and graduated from Miranda House, University of Delhi.
Handpicked by Rajiv
Known to be 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 served first as the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and later as a Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s office. She represented the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat from 1985 to 1989.
In his tribute, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described Sheila Dikshit as a “warm and affable personality who made notable contribution towards Delhi’s development”.
After she lost the elections from Kannauj in 1989, Ms. Dikshit spent years in wilderness after Rajiv Gandhi’s death and returned to the mainstream only after Sonia Gandhi became the party chief.
Her largely successful legacy was, however, marred by the CWG scam as the BJP accused her of large- scale corruption in several development contracts approved to meet the 2010 Commonwealth Games deadline.
Ms. Dikshit’s political run in Delhi ended in 2013 after AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal defeated her in Assembly polls. She was then a first time Lok Sabha member from Kannauj after assisting her father-in-law Uma Shankar Dikshit, who was a loyalist of Jawaharlal Nehru, served as a Minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet in 1971 and had become Governor of Karnataka and West Bengal. She was married in July 1962 to bureaucrat Vinod Dikshit.
“I came to share my husband's regard for Sheilaji & to value her very special gifts as I developed my own close relationship with her. We worked closely together during the years she was Chief Minister of Delhi, DPCC chief & Secretary of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust,” Ms Gandhi said in a letter to Dikshit’s son.
Projected as chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh, ahead of 2017 assembly polls, she had to withdraw after the Congress tied up with the Samajwadi Party. She also served as governor of Kerala from 2013-14.
She was again made the Delhi Congress chief just ahead of Lok Sabha election to take the party out of wilderness, but she herself lost the North East seat in Delhi to BJP’s Manoj Tiwari and the party drew a blank.