New Delhi, Sept. 30 :    New Delhi, Sept. 30:  Sushma Swaraj may have lost Delhi and Bellary, but in the end she won her battle against Atal Behari Vajpayee. With her induction into Vajpayee's Cabinet today - despite his alleged reluctance - Sushma has bounced back into the BJP mainstream after a long spell on the fringe. Sushma's run of bad luck, after a double-barrelled Cabinet stint as I&B and communications minister, started when she was moved to Delhi as chief minister barely two months before it went to polls - only to take care of the inner-party wranglings on the hope that her 'charisma and oratory' would carry the day. She was chosen as the 'consensus' candidate at the last minute because her predecessor Sahib Singh Verma refused to have his own predecessor Madan Lal Khurana as his successor. But Delhi - from where she won two successive Lok Sabha elections - proved to be her nemesis. She had barely settled down when she was implicated in a controversy involving Romesh Sharma, a Dawood frontman. The allegation, though unsubstantiated, was that Sushma was 'linked' to Sharma. Her own election from a south Delhi Assembly seat was held in dubious circumstances. A majority of the voters of a jhuggi-jhopdi cluster went down with food poisoning on polling day and couldn't cast their vote. Sushma won. But after the BJP's debacle, she quit her Assembly seat and returned to the Lok Sabha, hoping to be reinstated in the Cabinet. Vajpayee ruled it out categorically. Piqued, Sushma refused to contest the 1999 Lok Sabha polls. But after being 'persuaded' by mentor L.K. Advani and Lok Shakti chief Ramakrishna Hegde, she agreed to take on Sonia Gandhi in Bellary. BJP sources saw it as Sushma's chance to be back in the national spotlight. She put her heart and soul into the campaign, picked up Kannada, toured Bellary tirelessly and gave Sonia a run for her money. But the blitzkrieg was forgotten as quickly as it was unleashed. Sushma went almost out of sight. When the Vajpayee government was installed a second time, she was left out of it. She turned down an offer to rejoin the BJP as a general secretary-cum-spokesperson, maintaining all along that she would 'work like a true servant of the party' whenever she was asked to. Sources close to Sushma, however, claimed she felt slighted by the offer which came after Sumitra Mahajan quit as general secretary to become part of the Prime Minister's Cabinet. 'She wouldn't fill a vacancy created by Sumitra Mahajan,' they said. 'After all, she had served as a general secretary long before the party even thought of Sumitra.' A bout of severe diabetes virtually grounded her in Delhi after that. In between, husband Swaraj Kaushal seemed to have done his bit to further upset Sushma's equation with Vajpayee. A Rajya Sabha MP from the Haryana Vikas Party, he asked in the House if the Prime Minister had planned to lug an ass and an elephant as part of his US entourage. The Prime Minister and the PMO were hardly amused. The BJP's Nagpur conclave last August came in handy for Sushma to hit back at the leadership. At a closed door session of the national executive, she attacked the government's Kashmir policy and security lapses behind the massacre of the Amarnath pilgrims. The Nagpur press interpreted her tirade as an attack on Advani more than Vajpayee. Sushma didn't contradict the interpretations and, according to BJP sources, seemed 'quite pleased' with the impact of her speech. She again rebuffed an offer to join the new party chief Bangaru Laxman's team. Party sources say Sushma would have continued to be out on a limb had Advani not pressed Vajpayee for a Cabinet shuffle and a place for his protégé.