New Delhi: After 11 days of suspense, the BJP on Wednesday (February 19) announced first-time MLA Rekha Gupta as its pick to steer the Delhi government.
The 50-year old legislator upstaged her senior colleagues and prominent names in the BJP’s Delhi unit such as Parvesh Verma, Ashish Sood, Virendra Sachdeva, Vijender Gupta and Satish Upadhyay.
After the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj, the Congress’s Sheila Dikshit and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s Atishi, Gupta will be Delhi’s fourth woman chief minister.
Late on Wednesday Gupta called on Delhi’s lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena and staked claim to form the government. Saxena accepted her claim and invited her to form the government.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), with which Gupta has been associated since the beginning of her political career, is said to have impacted the BJP’s choice for chief minister.
Gupta had contested from north-west Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh constituency unsuccessfully in 2015 and 2020. However, she defeated her AAP rival Bandana Kumari by over 29,500 votes in the election held on February 5. More recently, she was defeated by the AAP’s Shelly Oberoi in the 2023 Delhi mayoral elections.
Her appointment makes her the only woman among the BJP’s 14 chief ministers across India. The Modi government would likely look to amplify her appointment as its signal to women, who are generally being seen as an emerging voter constituency.
Additionally, her appointment is in line with the Modi government’s unstated policy of rewarding ground-level workers in top posts despite their negligible legislative and administrative experiences, as was seen in states like Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha recently.
In a statement on X, Gupta pledged to “work with full honesty, integrity and dedication for the welfare, empowerment and overall development of every citizen of Delhi”.
“I am fully committed to this important opportunity to take Delhi to new heights,” she added in her post made in Hindi.
The BJP’s Delhi legislature party met on Wednesday evening to choose a chief minister a full 11 days after the saffron party defeated the AAP in the assembly election, having won 48 seats in a house of 70. This was the saffron party’s first win in Delhi in 26 years.
Earlier in the day, the BJP appointed Patna Sahib MP Ravi Shankar Prasad and former Union minister O.P. Dhankar as observers for the legislature party meeting.
The saffron party previously had a government in Delhi only for a single term between 1993 and 1998, when assembly elections in the half-state first took place. That term saw the BJP change its chief minister thrice, with Madan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma and finally Sushma Swaraj assuming the post.
Gupta’s challenge will be to first implement the multiple welfare promises that the BJP had made during the campaign. Some of its prominent promises include a monthly allowance of Rs 2,500 to poor women, implementing the Ayushman Bharat medical insurance scheme in Delhi, ramping up road and other infrastructure, cleaning the river Yamuna and controlling the hazardous levels of air pollution in the state.
After staking claim to form the government, Gupta said that all the promises made by the BJP in the election campaign will be fulfilled in a “time bound manner”.
“There is only one priority: the commitments we have made to Delhi, the dream Prime Minister Modi has for Delhi, fulfilling it is my first and foremost priority,” she said to PTI.
After start in ABVP, Gupta worked her way up BJP rank and file
Gupta, who is currently serving as one of the unit secretaries and vice president of the party’s women’s wing, was born in 1974 in Jind, Haryana to a family belonging to the Bania community, which has been the mainstay of the BJP in Delhi for many decades.
Her father was a State Bank of India employee who moved to Delhi when she was only two years old.
She joined the RSS’s student’s wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, as a Delhi University student.
Rekha Gupta (left) as a Delhi University student leader. Photo: X/@LambaAlka.
Following her electoral success as secretary of the Daulat Ram College’s student union, she was also elected as president of the Delhi University Students’ Union in 1995.
Gupta also acquired a law degree from Delhi University and worked her way up the BJP rank and file.
Her foray into mainstream electoral politics began in 2007 when she first became a municipal councillor in North Pitampura. Meanwhile, she also served in the Delhi BJP’s women’s wing as general secretary, following which she was brought into the party’s national women’s wing.
She served as mayor of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation when re-elected as a municipal councillor in 2012, before it and two other corporations in the city were unified as the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
In 2015, when she first contested the Delhi assembly polls, the AAP’s Bandana Kumari defeated her by nearly 11,000 votes. Then in 2020, the margin of her defeat to Kumari came down to around 3,400 votes.
