NEW DELHI Senior Congress leader and three-time former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit passed away Saturday afternoon at a private hospital here after suffering a cardiac arrest, doctors said.
She was 81.
Dikshit breathed her last at 3.55 pm at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute.
She was brought to the hospital Saturday morning in a “critical condition with cardiac arrest”, a Fortis Escorts statement said.
“A multi-disciplinary team of doctors, led by Dr Ashok Seth, Chairman, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, carried out the advanced resuscitative measures. Her condition stabilised temporarily. However, she had another cardiac arrest and despite all the resuscitative efforts, passed away at 3:55pm on July 20, 2019,” it said.
The Delhi unit of the Congress said that her body has been kept at her Nizamuddin East residence and the last rites would be performed on Sunday at the Nigambodh ghat.
Dikshit was president of Delhi Congress. She served as Delhi’s chief minister for 15 years from 1998-2013 and also served as the governor of Kerala.
She unsuccessfully fought the recent Lok Sabha elections from the North-East Delhi constituency. She represented New Delhi constituency in Delhi Vidhan Sabha.
Dikshit became an MP for the first time from Kannauj Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh in 1984. She was also a close associate of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and a minister in his cabinet.
President Ram Nath Kovind, Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal were among those who condoled her death.
Kovind said Dikshit’s term in office was a period of momentous transformation for the capital for which she will be remembered.
Naidu termed her a good administrator.
Condoling the demise of Dikshit, Modi said she made a noteworthy contribution to Delhi’s development.
“Deeply saddened by the demise of Sheila Dikshit Ji. Blessed with a warm and affable personality, she made a noteworthy contribution to Delhi’s development,” he tweeted.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said he was devastated to hear the news.
He called her a “beloved daughter of the Congress Party, with whom I shared a close personal bond”.
He said she served “selflessly as a three-term chief minister”.
Kejriwal said Dikshit’s death is a huge loss for Delhi and her contribution will always be remembered.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh said the country has lost a dedicated Congress Leader of the masses.
Dikshit: The affable politician who gave Delhi its modern look
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.
A warm and affable politician, she was 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 represented the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat then.
For her, politics was not only about jousting for power but also about bonding with people and getting re-energised in the process.
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 was 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 ruled the city state for three consecutive terms from 1998 to 2013, 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 and also led the phasing out of the killer blue line buses, that had claimed several lives on the roads.
Her largely glorious legacy in Delhi 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 deadlines.
Dikshit’s super political run in Delhi ended in 2013 at the hands of AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal who defeated her in assembly polls. Kejriwal, the product of the anti- corruption movement led by Anna Hazare succeeded Dikshit as Delhi chief minister.
She sailed through many storms in her long political innings and sought to steer the faction-ridden party out of oblivion after she was made the Delhi Congress chief ahead of assembly polls.
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 drubbing.
Dikshit stepped in to assist her father-in-law and was noticed by Indira Gandhi, who nominated her first as a member of the Indian delegation to the UN Commission on status of women.
First elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984 from Kannauj of Uttar Pradesh, she served as a Minister under Rajiv Gandhi first as the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and later as a Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s office.
In 1989, she lost the elections from Kannauj. Dikshit spent years in wilderness after Rajiv Gandhi’s death and returned to the mainstream only after Sonia became the party chief.
She was also projected as chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh, ahead of 2017 assembly polls, but had to withdraw after the Congress tied up with the Samajwadi Party.
She also served as governor of Kerala from 2013-14.
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