New voters let Cong down in 2013 Delhi elections: Sheila

NEW DELHI: The lack of support from first-time voters, who took Delhi’s infrastructure and growth for granted, was one of the key factors that led to the Congress being voted out of power in 2013, former chief minister Sheila Dikshit has said in her soon-to-be-released autobiography.

The youngsters, about four lakh of them, could not acknowledge the changes that her government had brought, unaware of what Delhi was like before she took over, she writes in Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life (Bloomsbury), which will be released at the Jaipur Literature Festival on January 27.

“A considerable chunk of voters, who were casting their ballot for the first time, had not seen the Delhi of 15 years ago. To them a Delhi with regular power, flyovers and Metro rail, as well as several new universities, was their ‘natural right’ and therefore taken for granted. They could not be expected to feel ecstatic about it,” says the 79-year-old who ruled the state from 1998 to 2013.

The Congress did not take Arvind Kejriwal’s foray into politics seriously enough and his ability to tap into the sentiments of the voters, she confesses.

“I myself was defeated by a margin of over 25,000 votes, losing the prestigious New Delhi seat to Arvind Kejriwal of AAP, a party that many of us had underestimated. In fact, in a rare outburst to a television reporter, who wanted to know how we could have underestimated AAP, I retorted, ‘Because we were foolish’,” she writes.

Dikshit first became chief minister at a time when Delhi was, in her words, a dysfunctional city with bad roads, inadequate public transport, disappointing power and water situation, traffic jams and pollution.

Over the course of her tenure, Delhi got the Metro, a new CNG regime in public transport, and a fleet of air-conditioned buses.