Sushma Swaraj: extraordinary leader with many firsts

The last rites for Sushma Swaraj, the former foreign minister and a BJP stalwart, were conducted Wednesday to the sounds of ceremonial bugle and Vedic mantras, the widely different tunes emblematic of the woman herself who harmonised many different chords in her persona.
Swaraj, one of India’s most high profile woman politicians who died on Tuesday night, combined her hard-nosed politics with compassion and empathy, winning admirers across the political spectrum and among ordinary people whose lives she touched often, sometimes personally and often through social media.The 67-year-old veteran BJP leader and former External Affairs minister, always distinctive with ‘sindoor’ and a large ‘bindi’, brought a human approach to India’s diplomacy.The powerful orator leaves behind the legacy of an easily-accessible leader who played a key role in BJP’s emergence in the late 1990s.The commitment of a leader, who became an MLA for the first time when she was just 25 before going on to become Haryana’s education minister, was there till the very end. Hours before her death on Tuesday night, Swaraj was on Twitter, congratulating Prime Narendra Modi after the Centre’s move to revoke the special status for Jammu and Kashmir.”I was waiting to see this day in my lifetime,” she said in her prescient message. A short while later, she died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences after suffering a cardiac arrest.Swaraj, who had a kidney transplant in 2016, had opted out of fighting the Lok Sabha elections this year due to health reasons.She was not part of the Modi government this time and S Jaishankar replaced her as the external affairs minister. She will long be remembered for being that rare minister who exuded so much warmth that people didn’t hesitate to reach out to her in times of need. Swaraj could be depended on to help out the diaspora in distress with her revolutionary social media outreach.As the tributes poured in after her sudden death, there were many who remembered her as a mother figure.
Several path-breaking measures such as the passport infrastructure expansion and enhanced engagement with the East were the highlights of her tenure as the external affairs minister.