Sushma Swaraj

Sushma Swaraj (born February 14, 1952, Ambala, Punjab [now in Haryana], India—died August 6, 2019, New Delhi) was an Indian politician and government official who served in a variety of legislative and administrative posts at the state (Haryana) and national levels in India. She was the first woman to serve as chief minister of Delhi for a brief period (October–December 1998). She served as the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) for five years (2009–14) and as minister of external affairs (2014–19) in the BJP-led cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Early life, education, and early career

Sushma Sharma was born to a middle-class family in the city of Ambala (now in Haryana state). Her father, Hardev Sharma, was prominent in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a pro-Hindutva organization from which the BJP was a political offshoot. She completed a law degree at Panjab University in Chandigarh and in 1973 qualified to practice law in the Supreme Court of India. While a student, she was politically active, notably as the leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a pro-Hindutva youth organization associated with the RSS. The ABVP was strongly opposed to the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In 1975 she married lawyer and politician Swaraj Kaushal, who served a term (1990–93) as governor of Mizoram state, and adopted his first name as her surname.

Political career

In 1977, as a member of the Janata Party, Swaraj ran for office for the first time and was elected to a seat in the legislative assembly of Haryana. She served two terms there (1977–82 and 1987–90), during which she also was minister of labor and employment (1977–79) and of education, food, and civil supplies (1987–90) in the state government. In 1984 she joined the BJP (which had been established by members from Janata in 1980) and was appointed secretary of the party. She advanced in the party ranks to become its general secretary.

Swaraj failed three times (1980, 1984, and 1989) in her bids to win a seat in the Lok Sabha, losing each time to a candidate from the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). In 1990, however, she was elected to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of the parliament). She successfully contested a seat in the Lok Sabha six years later and also briefly was a cabinet minister (information and broadcasting) in the 13-day BJP-led government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (May–June 1996).

First woman chief minister of Delhi and return to central politics

In 1998 she was reelected to the Lok Sabha and was briefly in charge of the information and broadcasting ministry (March–October) before resigning her seat to become the chief minister of Delhi (the first woman to hold that office), a position she held for less than two months (from mid-October to early December). After the BJP lost the 1998 Delhi assembly elections, Swaraj decided to return to national-level politics.

In the 1999 parliamentary elections, Swaraj ran for a Lok Sabha seat from the Ballari constituency in the state of Karnataka. She conducted a spirited campaign against Sonia Gandhi (widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi), who by then was the leader of the Congress Party and was making her electoral debut. Swaraj lost the contest by the relatively small margin of some 55,000 votes, but in 2000 she returned to the parliament in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) electoral victory, having won a seat in the Rajya Sabha. She was the minister of information and broadcasting (2000–03) and both health and family welfare and parliamentary affairs (2003–04) in the NDA government.

Following the 2004 parliamentary elections, in which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance emerged victorious, Swaraj (who had retained her Rajya Sabha seat) threatened to shave her head and don a white sari (a symbol of mourning) if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister. (Gandhi, for unrelated reasons, chose not to run for the office.) Swaraj was reelected to her third term in the Rajya Sabha two years later and was appointed the deputy leader of the opposition in that chamber. She won her third term in the Lok Sabha in the 2009 parliamentary elections, scoring a notable victory margin of 389,000 votes, and in December of that year was appointed leader of the BJP opposition in the house.

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Minister of external affairs

Swaraj won by an even greater margin in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as part of the BJP’s landslide victory and was given the important portfolios of external affairs and overseas Indian affairs in Prime Minister Modi’s cabinet. In this capacity she developed a reputation for her warm interactions with Indian citizens on social media. In late 2016 she suffered kidney failure. She underwent a successful kidney transplant but continued to experience health issues that affected her capacity as a public servant. She opted not to run for reelection in the spring of 2019 and left Modi’s cabinet at the end of his first term. In August of that year she died of cardiac arrest.

In 2020 she was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan, one of India’s highest civilian honors. Her daughter, Bansuri Swaraj, was elected to the Lok Sabha in the 2024 general election.