Sheila Dikshit remains the only woman chief minister to have won three successive elections, and she has been widely hailed as a good chief minister who ushered Delhi into the 21st century. Despite this achievement, her political career didn’t end on a happy note, mirroring the decline of the Congress party. As Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, her stint as Governor of Kerala was cut short.
Early last year, Sheila Dikshit published her autobiography, Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life, setting the record straight about her life and times.
“One day I received a phone call,” she writes, “that had the power to change my life’s trajectory completely. The call was from Rajiv Gandhi telling me that he wanted me to contest from Uttar Pradesh in the coming elections.”
She fought and won from Kannauj in 1984. This phone call was no accident though. Rajiv Gandhi knew Sheila Dikshit through her father-in-law, the stalwart Uma Shankar Dikshit. He was a freedom fighter who worked closely with all members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, from Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi.
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Indira Gandhi sent Rajiv Gandhi to Uma Shankar Dikshit to learn about the history of the party. “The first time Rajiv came home, he noticed Dr Spock’s book on childcare on the shelf and remarked upon it,” Sheila Dikshit recalled. “When I said I had brought up my children on Dr Spock’s wisdom, he said, ‘We did the same.’”
One day in 1969, Indira Gandhi asked Uma Shankar Dikshit to make sure that V.V. Giri was elected President of India, as opposed to the candidate supported by the rival Congress ‘Syndicate’. This task involved so much work that he needed secretarial help. His son Vinod was a bureaucrat and stayed away from politics. It fell upon the daughter-in-law to help. That is how Sheila Dikshit became a politician.
A long winter
After that first election in 1984, she lost a string of Lok Sabha elections. She was out in the cold in the P.V. Narasimha Rao years. She writes of Rao: “Our communication never really extended beyond pleasantries. That state of affairs continued even after he became the Prime Minister. After a hectic five years, I was benched, so to speak.”
This was a difficult period in her life. Her husband died of a heart attack inside a train bathroom at 48. The person who gave her a chance in politics, Rajiv Gandhi, was killed in a bomb blast. When her political mentor, her father-in-law, heard of Rajiv’s death, he remarked, “And here I go on living.” A few days later, he died too.
In this long winter, she kept in touch with Sonia Gandhi. Dikshit writes: “Perhaps it had to do with my own experience, not so long ago, of the loss of a husband and companion in mid-life, I felt a need to be in touch with Mrs Sonia Gandhi in one of the most difficult phases of her life. She had become a virtual recluse. During those meetings, she hardly spoke. If at all she did, it was in monosyllables. Always attired in white, she seemed to be in a world of her own. I would chat about this and that, very carefully touching upon politics every now and then.”
Luck favours the brave
In 1998, with Sonia Gandhi fully in control of the Congress party, Sheila Dikshit was back on the scene. She lost a Lok Sabha election in Delhi in 1998, but Sonia still made her Delhi Congress Pradesh Committee chief. The Delhi assembly election was just seven months away.
Defeating the BJP seemed impossible. Dikshit’s sister Pam remarked, “For heaven’s sake, Didi, what are you getting into? Don’t you know Delhi is a BJP stronghold?”
The bigwigs in the Delhi state Congress didn’t oppose Sheila Dikshit’s appointment because “they considered me a lightweight who would not be able to take the battle to the BJP camp. Once I inevitably stumbled, they would assume their position of dominance!”
Dikshit initially put up a positive campaign, against the poor performance of a BJP government that changed its chief ministers twice. She writes: “I could also sense something else, the frustration of a city that did not want to be treated as a provincial place. It was the Capital and wanted to take its rightful place among the capitals of the world.”
It helped that she could appeal to people across identities: “Unlike the other Delhi leaders, who were closely identified with one or another community such as Jats or Gujjars, or associated with the violence that had rocked Delhi in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, I had a neutral persona.”
And then, she got lucky with soaring prices of onions and it was an easy victory.
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Party versus people
She credited her successive two victories to her single-minded focus on improving Delhi and helping the people. A key aspect of this was the Bhagidari platform to bring together the government, the officials and associations of residents. She also ran a public durbar twice a day, one hour in the morning and one in the evening. Politics, she learnt from her father-in-law, was about public service. She writes of him: “In his old world politics, influenced by Gandhiji and his contemporaries, there was no time off from public interaction.”
This is not merely self-praise. Dikshit emphasises this point repeatedly in her book to serve as a contrast to the dissidents within her party who kept trying to bring her down. For Dikshit, “party politics” and “serving the people” are two different boxes. She writes: “I was an outsider to the kind of durbar politics that had characterised Congress politics in Delhi. Until then Congressmen were more used to capturing the party, not votes.”
The factional politics was so bad that one Congressman who was a municipal councillor had her Nizamuddin East home inspected for irregularities. Not once in her book does she complain about the Delhi unit of the BJP, focusing only on her own party colleagues. Fed up of their attacks on her, she sent her resignation to Sonia Gandhi, which was promptly rejected.
Without naming Manmohan…
Sheila Dikshit and the citizens of Delhi were no longer on the same page by the end of the third term. She minces no words and squarely blames the UPA-2 government for this.
On the Commonwealth Games 2010 fiasco, she writes: “The delays were due to the lack of a clear chain of command. I had seen the work that had gone into the preparations for the Asian Games of 1982, which triggered the first real transformation of Delhi. At that time the PMO was clearly in charge. It was monitoring the entire effort, led by Indira Gandhi who took a personal interest in the event. This time it was different, There was no unified command overseeing the entire effort or even in the know of the larger picture and details at the same time.”
“The Union Sports Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, like his predecessor, the late Sunil Dutt, had made it clear that he was in principle opposed to such mammoth events and so was a reluctant participant. The PMO too held back. As a general indifference marked the preparations, the Games started seeming a bit orphaned,” she says.
On Nirbhaya, she hints that then-Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde made her the scapegoat to protect himself: “The Centre’s unresponsive stance immediately after the incident seemed deliberate as it shifted the focus entirely on the Delhi government.”
All about distraction
All the fire-fighting on account of a poorly run UPA-2 government meant she couldn’t focus on Bhagidari or delivering her promises, she writes. But apart from the media, she also blames the changing nature of Indian elections for her 2013 defeat. “The face of politics is changing rapidly, so much so that at times it seems unrecognisable. Direct contact between the politician and the people was once seen to be the touchstone of political activity. Now politics is all about distraction, more so since our times have an abundance of means of distraction… What we get is tight scripts of political messaging directed through the vast world of social media as well as conventional media outlets,” she writes.
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With grace and dignity
She admits she felt hurt about the way her chief ministership ended, but is also proud of a life well-lived: “When I look back, I see an Indian woman, with what many may call a modern attitude even today, choosing to take the important decisions of her life and to be accountable for them. People often think that being independent cannot go with a sense of duty. They are wrong.”
Her critics say she just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Her answer: “Ultimately, it is what you make of chance and opportunity with a measure of grace and dignity. What more can one ask for in a tryst with life?
Views are personal.
Sheila Dixit is one of the rare politicians I admired , the article brings out all that was great about her .It’s pity we do not have more people like her in politics .
Said only half in jest, she would have made a better PM than Dr Singh.