Three top contenders proposed her name

The suspense over Delhi's new chief minister ended Wednesday evening as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced Rekha Gupta as its pick, bringing an end to 11 days of speculation following the party's sweeping victory in the state elections.

- Snehil Sinha and Paras Singh

[e-mail] NEW DELHI: 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.

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.

Indu Jain, who taught at Daulat Ram College from 1977 to 2020, said that Gupta was always dedicated to the causes she took up. "It is a very proud moment for us. I still remember that she was a very studious and a hardworking student. She was also very active in student politics at the time."

Former student leaders, even from other political parties, remember her as being strongly committed to her ideology as a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fount of the BJP.