Is the lioness in winter waiting for the call to arms once again? Sheila Dikshit laughs when asked if her political career, recounted in her autobiography, Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life (Bloomsbury), is all in the rear-view mirror. “No I don’t say that politics is over. But it (the book) is certainly being written at a time when politics can be over.” Later, she adds: “Politics has changed a lot and I don’t know whether I would fit into it.”

Memoirs of the former Delhi chief minister is the story of a life well spent, divided into three overlapping parts. First, there’s the daughter of a large and happy Punjabi family in the decades when Delhi was just a small town and where she and her two sisters cycled to school, through what is today called Lutyens’ Delhi. Then comes an informal proposal on the No 10 bus trundling through Chandni Chowk when her future husband Vinod Dikshit remarks casually, “I have found the girl I want to marry... she is sitting next to me.” From that moment began a life as a bureaucrat’s wife. Her husband Vinod was in the IAS Uttar Pradesh cadre and they spent 10 or 12 years in the State with postings in towns such as Bareilly, Gorakhpur, Almora and Lucknow.

Part three of her life began, though she didn’t realise it at the time, when she became an informal assistant to her father-in-law, veteran Congressman and former freedom fighter Uma Shankar Dikshit. The role involved “ensuring endless cups of tea for visitors, maintaining Dadda’s appointment diary... breaking into a meeting to tell him about a zaroori telephone call (from Indira Gandhi).” The informal became the formal only in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi, newly installed as prime minister, asked her to stand for election from Uttar Pradesh.

Never a dull moment

Why did she write the book? Says Dikshit: “I thought I had a life that should be noted down for posterity. Because it’s been an exciting life with never a dull moment. And I hoped it would make interesting reading.” Writing the book itself, was tough, she says, and took about two years in between the constant stream of people who still drop by even though she’s out of power. “I used to do it whenever I had time. None of my normal routine suffered.”

Dikshit has certainly adapted to circumstances throughout her life. She and her two sisters had been given a liberal upbringing and she was studying for an MA when she met her future husband. But, when she arrived at her husband’s home in Lucknow, it was with “a goonghat pulled all the way to my waist... and sleeping in the store-room crammed with utensils for want of space”. Within days, she had convinced her 86-year-old grandmother-in-law she was made of the right stuff.

But when the final call to the hustings came, her husband and father-in-law both insisted that she go ahead. Since her father-in-law was a giant of Uttar Pradesh politics, it was decided that she should stand from somewhere in the State. She says: “I told my father-in-law I can’t do it and he said, ‘No you have to do it.’ Finally, I chose Kannauj as my constituency which I had never been to before.”

After 18 months in Parliament, Dikshit got a quick promotion and was made Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs. But tragedy followed in 1987 when she was on a trip to New York, her husband Vinod suffered a heart attack. Dikshit dedicates the book to Vinod: “Husband, friend, companion and inspiration”. A portrait of her husband dominates her tasteful living room in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area. The second-floor apartment looks out over Humayun’s Tomb.

Dikshit only lasted one term in Uttar Pradesh politics. She notes ruefully that, “The work I had done over five years... made people say that ‘a lot of work has been done’, but it did not translate into votes.” Her next foray at the polls, after a gap, was after Sonia Gandhi called and asked her to stand in the sprawling East Delhi constituency. East Delhi had always been a BJP stronghold and also the Congress party’s local chieftains such as HKL Bhagat were against her. She lost the election but narrowed the margin of defeat from earlier years.

But Dikshit did make her name in Indian politics as the three-term chief minister of Delhi. She was a newcomer backed by Sonia Gandhi about whom she says in the book: “Mrs Sonia Gandhi is circumspect with her words and has a good memory. And she takes decisions carefully.” The local party barons, like Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, however, made strong efforts to topple her. Later, in 2005, a routine Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee meeting turned into a battleground. Once again she was backed by Sonia.

Neutral takes

Anyone hoping that Dikshit will tell all about what went on behind the scenes, will be sorely disappointed by this book. Dikshit outlines her government’s achievements, including building more hospitals and making the tough changeover ordered by the Supreme Court to CNG and privatising the city’s power supply. That move, inevitably, attracted strong criticism. But she lists what was called the Bhagidari scheme, which involved staying in touch with more than 2,000 residents’ welfare associations as the achievement of which she’s most proud. The Delhi Metro was started by her predecessor, but Dikshit claims credit for smoothening the way for its expansion. She recounts at length what went wrong with the Commonwealth Games and says she struggled to rescue the situation.

Are there any revelations at all? She says she was ‘benched’ by PV Narasimha Rao, who she describes as ‘happiest engaging with ideas’. And, soon after Rajiv died, she would visit Sonia occasionally, as they shared the unhappy bond of having lost their spouses. “During those meetings, she hardly spoke at all. Always attired in white, she seemed to be in a world of her own.”

Dikshit does confide in the book she was disappointed when the rumour she would be made home minister did not turn into reality. There’s a sense of the unfinished when she’s finally voted out of power. Dikshit chuckles when asked if Delhi’s current chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, has ever sought her advice. But she’s clear that Delhi is not a real State and the chief minister has to work within the constitutional framework. She says: “I suppose you can always ask for more power. But I don’t think it’s feasible because it’s the capital.”

A few days after Businessline met Dikshit, she was on a stage with the current DPCC chief Ajay Maken, who was once an arch-rival, and the two publicly buried the hatchet. For Dikshit, it looked like she might possibly return to the political arena, proving once and for all that in politics you never say never. Or, as she puts it phlegmatically: “Politics is something which you cannot predict.”

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