Sheila Dikshit: A politician who gave Delhi its modern look
| Date :21-Jul-2019 |
NEW DELHI:
WARM and affable, Sheila Dikshit was one of the tallest leaders of the Congress who had the distinction of being Delhi’s longest serving Chief Minister and giving the national capital Delhi its modern look. Considered close to 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 from 1985 to 1989. For her, politics was not only about jousting for power but also about bonding with people and getting re-energised in the process.
She had said in her autobiography that politics as an engagement with ideas and people can be inspiring, but it can be reduced to banality as she experienced in the last one or two years of her third term. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said she held the distinction of being the only woman Chief Minister in India who has led her party to three consecutive victories in Assembly elections. 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 got 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. As the longest serving woman Chief Minister who steered her party to victory for three consecutive terms in 1998, 2003 and 2008, 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 Delhi chief minister, Dikshit 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. She also led the phasing out of the killer blue line buses, that had claimed several lives on the roads.