She was a shy child, self-conscious about her appearance and intellect, as she points out in her book, Sucheta: An Unfinished Autobiography. It was the age she grew up in and the situations she faced that shaped her personality.[citation needed] Sucheta recounts how, as a 10-year-old, she and her siblings had heard their father and his friends talk about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It left them so outraged that they vented their anger on some of the Anglo-Indian children they played with, by calling them names.[citation needed]
She was one of the few women who were elected to the Constituent Assembly of India and was part of the subcommittee that drafted the Indian Constitution. She became a part of the subcommittee that laid down the charter for the constitution of India.[citation needed] On 14 August 1947, she sang Vande Mataram in the Independence Session of the Constituent Assembly a few minutes before Nehru delivered his famous "Tryst with Destiny" speech.[11] She was also the founder of the All India Mahila Congress, established in 1940.
After independence, she remained involved with politics. For the first Lok Sabha elections in 1952, she contested from New Delhi on a KMPP ticket: she had joined the short-lived party founded by her husband the year before. She defeated the Congress candidate Manmohini Sahgal. Five years later, she was reelected from the same constituency, but this time as the Congress candidate.[12] She was elected one last time to the Lok Sabha in 1967, from Gonda constituency in Uttar Pradesh.[9]
Meanwhile, she had also become a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. From 1960 to 1963, she served as Minister of Labour, Community Development and Industry in the UP government.[9] In October 1963, she became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the first woman to hold that position in any Indian state. The highlight of her tenure was the firm handling of a state employees strike. This first-ever strike by the state employees continued for 62 days. She relented only when the employees' leaders agreed to compromise. Kripalani kept her reputation as a firm administrator by refusing their demand for a pay hike. She was supported in administrative decisions and party organisation by the veteran leader Nirmal Chandra Chaturvedi, MLC.
↑David Gilmartin (2014). "Chapter 5: The paradox of patronage and the people's sovereignty". In Anastasia Pivliavsky (ed.). Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. pp.151–152. ISBN978-1-107-05608-4.
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