Why Delhi is truly missing Sheila Dikshit now

In May 1998, when Sheila Dikshit was made chief minister of Delhi just six months before the state assembly election, her friends and family thought she had made a mistake by accepting Sonia Gandhi’s offer.

Surely the Congress had no chance in an urban city-state seen as a BJP stronghold. This was going to be the end of her faltering political career, they felt.

She not only went on to win the election but to win it twice again, becoming a rather likeable face of Delhi for 15 years. How did she do it?

Instead of bothering about a strong BJP or a local Congress always out to undermine her, Sheila Dikshit designed a campaign from her gut, thinking not as a politician but as a resident of Delhi.

She wrote in her autobiography, “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.”

The state of roads, the power cuts in the gruelling summer, the intermittent water supply and the worsening pollution with a shrinking green cover were there for everyone to see.

Dikshit then gave Delhi a vision and carried it out against all odds, from flyovers to increasing green cover, from improving electricity supply to engaging with local governance through resident welfare associations (RWAs).

Politics vs Progress

Today Delhi is in a mess again but there is no Sheila Dikshit. The three main parties have started making tall promises and in the next few days we are going to be bombarded by their very specific tangible “guarantees” and promises. Most of these, at least the flagship ones, will be cash transfer freebies, the flavour of the season.

But there is something that cash transfers to women or unemployed youth can’t do: fix Delhi’s governance which is now in a mess. Delhi once again needs a transformative vision and everyone can feel it. No matter which party wins with what kind of landslide, Delhi will continue to miss Sheila Dikshit.

The Aam Aadmi Party, the Bhartiya Janta Party and the Congress all seem to be more interested in power and politics than in fixing Delhi’s woes.

The BJP comes across as being more interested in defeating the Aam Aadmi Party than in giving the citizens of Delhi a new deal. It could have done this by presenting a fresh new chief ministerial candidate or at least by opening its campaign with a positive governance vision.

The Aam Aadmi Party, battered by legal cases, jail time for its leaders and its hands tied by a bureaucracy that does not report to the elected government, seems to be more interested in retaining Delhi to make a political point. The AAP lost its “Delhi model” kind of positioning at some point, unable to take it forward.

Bankruptcy of ideas

It is currently making a big deal of its promise to give Rs 2,100 per month to women, a promise it can probably not fulfil. The BJP and Congress have both countered it with Rs 2500 each.

The Congress has also promised Rs 8,500 per month to unemployed youth but it can promise anything it wants given it has zero seats and would be lucky to win one. The Congress, which keeps reminding people of the late Sheila Dikshit’s tenure, is reduced to hoping to win a minority-dominated seat or two.

The obsessive focus on cash transfers as a shortcut to win elections is part of a wider malaise, affecting Delhi but also India at large: the bankruptcy of truly transformative ideas for development, growth, job creation, civic renewal, and reimagining agriculture.

The political class as a whole is devoid of ideas. Which once again reminds us of the need for leaders like Sheila Diskhit, who knew the art of taking bold policy initiatives and translating them into a political language to retain votes.

Today our political class across party lines seems to have decided that development, growth and policy don’t win votes. Only freebies and emotional polarisation do.

The main polarisation in Delhi is between the slums and the colonies, the “jhuggi jhopdis” and the “kothis”. Whoever can monopolise the votes of the poor tends to win. Earlier it was Sheila Dikshit and now Arvind Kejriwal. This election is one more opportunity for the BJP to break that jinx.

Yet both the slums and the colonies have little hope that the election result will give them regular clean drinking water in their taps, or reduce monsoon flooding, or improve the state of Delhi government-run health facilities.

Note how no party even pretends to care about air pollution in what is often the world’s most polluted city. It is seen as a matter of concern only for a select few middle class elites who won’t change the election. Sheila Dikshit would not have seen it this way.