A senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Swaraj was the second woman to hold the office of Minister of External Affairs, after Indira Gandhi.

[4] In the 2014 Indian general election, Swaraj won the Vidisha constituency in Madhya Pradesh for a second term, retaining her seat by a margin of over 400,000 votes.

[6][7] She decided not to contest the 2019 Indian general election as she was recovering from a kidney transplant and needed to "save herself from dust and stay safe from infection" and hence did not join the second Modi Ministry in 2019.

[17] She was educated at Sanatan Dharma College in Ambala Cantonment and earned a bachelor's degree with majors in Sanskrit and Political Science.

Under the second PM Vajpayee Government, she was sworn in as Union Cabinet Minister for Information and Broadcasting with an additional charge of the Ministry of Telecommunications from 19 March 1998 to 12 October 1998.

[24] She was Minister of Health, Family Welfare and Parliamentary Affairs from January 2003 until May 2004, when the National Democratic Alliance Government lost the general election.

[24] As Union Health Minister, she set up six All India Institute of Medical Sciences at Bhopal (MP), Bhubaneshwar (Odisha), Jodhpur (Rajasthan), Patna (Bihar), Raipur (Chhattisgarh) and Rishikesh (Uttrakhand).

Sushma Swaraj became Leader of Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha in place of Lal Krishna Advani on 21 December 2009, and retained this position until May 2014 when, in the 2014 Indian general election, her party won a major victory.

[35][36] As Minister of External Affairs of the NDA government, Swaraj issued an NOC against a specific query raised by the UK government about the Indo-UK bilateral relationship if the UK granted permission to Lalit Modi, an Indian fugitive in a cricket scandal who had been staying in Britain since 2010, to attend his wife's surgery in Portugal.

[38][39][40] On 12 August 2015, the leader of the Indian National Congress, Mallikarjun Kharge, moved an Adjournment Motion in the lower house seeking the resignation of Sushma Swaraj due to her alleged conduct in this regard.

Intervening in the motion, Swaraj clarified that Lalit Modi's right of residency was not cancelled, since the Enforcement Directorate did not file an extradition request.

Sushma Swaraj was heavily criticised in 2014 when she urged Prime Minister Modi to declare the Bhagavad Gita as the national book of India.

[41] As External Affairs Minister, she played a pivotal role in bringing back the then 23-year-old hearing and speech-impaired Indian girl named Gita who was stranded in Pakistan for 15 years.

The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognise the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.

On 19 February 2019 Swaraj accepted the prestigious Grand Cross of Order of Civil Merit, which was conferred by the Spanish government in recognition of India's support in evacuating its citizens from Nepal during the earthquake in 2015.

[45] During the times of the Emergency, on 13 July 1975, Sushma Sharma married Swaraj Kaushal, a peer and fellow advocate at the Supreme Court of India.

[51] Sushma Swaraj's sister Vandana Sharma is an associate professor of political science in a government college for girls in Haryana.

[54] On 6 August 2019, Sushma Swaraj reportedly suffered a heart attack in the evening after which she was rushed to AIIMS New Delhi, where she later died of a cardiac arrest.