From student leader to chief minister

A Daulat Ram College student who joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in 1992, going on to become the Delhi University Students' Union general secretary in 1995, and the body's president in 1996, Rekha Gupta cut her teeth in student politics in the national capital.

- Snehil Sinha and Paras Singh

Three decades later, after a journey that took her to the municipal corporation, and put her in several key roles in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Delhi unit, Gupta is about to take the reins as the fourth woman chief minister of Delhi.

She was born in 1974 in the Julana region of Jind district in Haryana. The family's ancestral village is Nandgarh, and they moved to Delhi in 1976 when the father, Jai Bhagwan Jindal, became the branch manager of State Bank of India, Pitampura, from where she would later contest legislative assembly elections. Her mother, Urmila Jindal, was a homemaker.

She married Manish Gupta, an industrialist who deals in brass parts, in 1998. They have two children - a son who is in college and a daughter who is involved in the family business.

It was while pursuing her BCom from Daulat Ram College that she began her political journey by participating in various political and community events.