Sheila Dikshit truly a daughter of Delhi who never stopped building bridges

Inaugurating a long-delayed flyover in Delhi on July 16 — the cause of endless traffic jams to the airport — Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal patted himself on the back and said, in that point-scoring way politicians have, “In 15 years, the Sheila Dikshit government built 70 flyovers. In the last four-and-a-half years, our (AAP) government has built 23 flyovers.”

Four days later he leapt in to order a state funeral and two days’ mourning when Sheila Dikshit, the city-state’s most famous chief minister, quietly passed away. And the prime minister rushed to her house for a condolence visit and paid fulsome tributes. 

A Delhi election is due in early 2020 and, as her bitter foes, neither dared not offend the memory of a hugely popular, politically bip­artisan figure who ran the city-state for 15 years. 

How this diminutive, convent-educated daughter-in-law of an old-style Brahmin Congress Party boss and wife of a 1960 batch IAS officer became a universally loved “Auntyji” to Delhi’s notoriously fickle and demanding electorate offers a master class in political management and governance. 

Riven with a myriad conflicting class and power interests, the national capital is no melting pot. It is a place that belongs to everybody and to nobody, from its waves of rootless migrants living in pockets of abject squalor to the noblesse oblige of VIP elites that are deeply embedded in its DNA.

As political leaders go, Sheila Dikshit was Exhibit A of the city’s urban elite. She was neither a rabble-rousing street fighter like Mamata Banerjee, nor a caste leader like Mayawati, nor a remote, ruthless Lady Bo­u­n­tiful type like Jayalalithaa. She went to a smart women’s college, Miranda House, and ma­rried a Stephanian, a text book romance se­aled by a proposal on a “U special” bus to Delhi University. Her anglicised Punjabi fa­t­her (a civilian officer in the army) had nam­e­d his three daughters musically, their nam­es ending in “la” — Sheila, Pamela and Romila — and she grew up in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, in government bungalows with street names like Rouse Avenue and Dupleix Lane. Yet the slur of “Lutyens’ elitist” never stuck to her during her long innings. Later, despite the opposition’s noisy ca­m­paign alleging corruption, particularly during the Commonweath Games when she pr­esided over a vast budget, nothing was proven.   

As someone acquainted with her since her first (and only non-Delhi) election from Kannauj in Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide of 1984, her transformation as a force in Delhi sprang from the patronage of the Gandhi family. But she rose above being a mere pawn, and posed no threat, at their court.

It was her adroit handling of vicious Congress factions, outreach to BJP leaders, and ceaseless bridge-building among all sections in the city — the young and old, basti-dwellers and multiple elites — that cemented her durability. She became a hand-holding nanny, motherly drawing room ornament and shrewd administrator all rolled in one.

“Mann lagaa key padna, zaroor acchey number aayengey,” (Concentrate hard, you’ll get good numbers), rang out her convent-tinged voice on radio as children prepped for their exams. Initiatives such as the Metro’s expansion, or converting public transport to clean fuel, were not her ideas. But she pushed for them, and being no pushover, took the laurels. Other important reforms — the painful privatisation of power supply, for example, or empowering neighbourhoods through bhagidari or stakeholders’ schemes — were spearheaded by her. 

It is a widely accepted truth that political leaders become accessible (and suddenly acquire congenial human attributes) once they lose power. The opposite was true of Sheila Dikshit. 

During periods of political eclipse — for example, when she lost in 2013 to AAP’s sweep — she maintained her composure, moving back to the small Nizamuddin flat that she owned, near her sister Romila Dhawan’s home. “It was Arvind Kejriwal’s promises of free water and slashed electricity rates that got her. She knew they were not sustainable,” recalls Ms Dhawan.

Few who knocked on her door were turned away. Although I met her in the course of professional assignments. 

I once visited to thank her for the swift dispatch of a corrupt municipal official notorious for his dilatory, money-grubbing ways. On the contrary, she said, she wished to thank me for bringing his misdemeanors, which she had confirmed, to her attention.
“How can I hope to clean up the city without such feedback?”

In contrast to the current anti-culture and anti-media environment she was adept at keeping channels wide open. Her media relations were excellent, thanks to aides likes Pawan Khera, continually on call like his boss. Her interest in the arts was genuine. Occasionally spotted at plays, art shows and book launches, she helped start a series of music and dance festivals. When Laila Tyabji, head of the craftspeople society Dastkar, was denied exhibition space by obdurate officials she turned to Sheila Dikshit. “She tried but couldn’t convince her bureaucrats,” recalls Ms Tyabji. “But she would visit, was appreciative and encouraging — it was the same for anyone in the arts, culture and NGO sphere who asked her.” 

Sheila Dikshit received the heartfelt send-off she did because she was truly a daughter of Delhi who never stopped building bridges.