Photos: Remembering Sushma Swaraj, BJP stalwart and former external affairs minister

Former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj died of cardiac arrest on Tuesday night in New Delhi. She was 67. Swaraj, who was the foreign minister May 26 2014 to May 30 2019, was the second woman to hold the office, after Indira Gandhi. She entered the Haryana assembly in 1977, and became a minister in the state cabinet at the age of 25. She was a former chief minister of Delhi and has been part of every BJP government at the Centre except the current one. ...read more

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Former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, who extended a helping hand to many Indians in distress abroad and acquired a reputation as one of the most accessible ministers in the first term of the Narendra Modi government, suffered a heart attack late in the evening on Tuesday night and breathed her last at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. She was 67. (Pradeep Bhatia / HT Archive)

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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj poses for photographs with Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, Queen Jetsun Pema and their son prince Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck on December 31, 2019. Sushma Swaraj was born on 14 February 1953 at Ambala Cantt, Haryana. She was educated at Sanatan Dharma College in Ambala Cantonment and earned a bachelor’s degree with majors in Sanskrit and Political Science. In 1973, she started practice as an advocate in the Supreme Court of India. (PTI Archive)

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Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and then Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj during former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary, at Parliament House, on August 20, 2014. She began her political career with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in the 1970s. Her husband, Swaraj Kaushal, was closely associated with the socialist leader George Fernandes and Swaraj became a part of George Fernandes’s legal defence team in 1975. After the Emergency, she joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. (Arvind Yadav / HT Archive)

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In 1977, Swaraj was elected as an MLA for the first time from Ambala cantonment Assembly at a young age of 25 and later, went on to become the education minister of Haryana. It so happened that the ticket was first given to Som Prakash Chopra, who was jailed during Emergency. But for some reasons, when he did not enter the fray, the ticket was given to Swaraj, who won, and the Janata Party government was formed. (Prakash Srivastav / HT Archive)

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Sushma Swaraj takes oath as CM of Delhi on October 12, 1998. She became the first female Chief Minister of Delhi and resigned from the position in December the same year. (Santosh Gupta / HT Archive)

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Hours before she passed away, Sushma Swaraj had tweeted her congratulations to the Prime Minister and Home Minister for the decision on Article 370. Here too, she had a role to play -- through her speech in the Lok Sabha in 1996 when she spoke on the BJP’s plan to remove Article 370, which is in the party’s core agenda, along with a uniform civil code and building a Ram temple at Ayodhya. (Virendra Singh Gosain / HT Archive)

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Sushma Swaraj on the first day after taking charge as Union Minister for External Affairs at South Block in New Delhi, India, on May 28, 2014. (Arvind Yadav / HT Archive)

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Sushma Swaraj with Mamata Banerjee during a banquet hosted in the honor of Bangladesh President M Abdul Hamid at Rashtrapati Bhavan. As the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, her informal interaction with journalists ended in May 2012 when some reporters quoted her on the possibility of Hamid Ansari’s chance in Rashtrapati Bhavan. After that she never returned to ‘background briefing’ to reporters, even as foreign affairs minister, and carried that grudge till her last days. (Kamal Kishore / PTI Archive)

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Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj addresses the United Nations General Assembly, on September 23, 2017, at U.N. headquarters. Last month, the International Court of Justice ruled that Pakistan had violated former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav’s right to consular access and called for a review of the death sentence handed to him by a military court at an appropriate forum of Islamabad’s choice. The ground work here was also laid out by Swaraj. (AP / PTI)