Former finance minister Arun Jaitley | Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg
New Delhi: Late at night on 7 August, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Jaitley took to Twitter to say he was “sad, pained and broken” by the passing away of fellow party veteran, and his colleague of decades, Sushma Swaraj.
Saddened, pained & broken on demise of Sushmaji. She was one of the most outstanding politicians in the Present Era. She distinguished in all positions. She held Senior Positions with the Party, NDA Govt. & while in opposition. She leaves behind a void which is difficult to fill.
Just over a fortnight later, it is time for the BJP to mourn one of its most charismatic, ingenious and agreeable leaders — Jaitley.
The former Union minister passed away at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Saturday, after battling illness for a couple of years. At 66, he was just a year younger than Swaraj, and both passing away within weeks of each other seems like one of those cruel co-incidences fiction is made of.
After all, both began their careers around the same time, immersing themselves in the the socialist movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan in the early 1970s and rising to prominence during the 1975-77 Emergency.
If former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veteran L.K. Advani were known as the two architects of the party’s phenomenal rise in national politics, Jaitley and Swaraj were crucial and indispensable building blocks.
While Swaraj and the rest were embodiments of all the BJP stood for — Hindutva, conservative politics and a grounded mass appeal — Jaitley was refreshingly different.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with BJP leaders Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley during group photo session before a meeting of the BJP Chief Ministers’ Council in New Delhi | Manvender Vashist | PTI File Photo
Arguably the BJP’s most high-profile “moderate” face ever, Jaitley brought with him what no other party leader did — an unquestioned acceptance even among the “liberals”, the “progressives” and anti-BJP sections. In that sense, he stood apart from his party colleagues, but, paradoxically, never without blending in completely.
Jaitley has undoubtedly been among the BJP’s most popular and recognised faces, despite never having succeeded in honing himself as a mass politician.
The politician, the person
Arun Jaitley’s trajectory in politics was much like that of his contemporaries — through youth politics. He served as president of the Delhi Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and then the president of the BJP youth wing.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, when the BJP was fanning the communal fire and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was its mainstay, Jaitley somehow managed to retain a “moderate” image. With his suave personality, impressive English and friends across party lines, Jaitley was every bit the quintessential “Delhi politician” — an exception in the BJP.
Arun Jaitley, then the finance minister, talks to Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad | Shahbaz Khan | PTI File Photo
He may not have been as fiery an orator as Swaraj, or as soothingly poetic as Vajpayee, or even as powerful as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but his clever choice of words, measured and pleasant manner of speaking, backed by vast knowledge, made him an enviable speaker in his own right — a skill frequently showcased in Parliament. His legal education and practice proved an asset in this regard.
It was precisely this skill that made him so indispensable to his party.
For the Modi-Amit Shah combine, Delhi was another world and they were outsiders when the BJP stormed to power in 2014. It was Jaitley who was their link to this world, and especially to the media.
If Modi was hostile and remains lukewarm to the English media, Jaitley was at ease, well-connected and immensely popular. Always accessible, he became one of the BJP’s most media-friendly, well-liked leaders, with a wit to watch out for.
In many ways, he was the party’s troubleshooter — especially when it came to legal matters, or the need to establish outreach with rivals. Jaitley’s morning walks, with friends who were eminent personalities across politics, civil services and the legal world, have been famous, as have the sumptuous breakfasts and meals he was known to serve.
In fact, he proved one of the most popular guests at ThePrint’s Off The Cuff event, addressing a hall that was bursting at its seams.
A man of many roles
Jaitley, who served as finance minister in the first term of the Modi government, also handled plum portfolios in the Vajpayee administration. Over the tenure of the two BJP-led governments, he served as minister for defence, corporate affairs, commerce & industry, and law & justice.
A senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, he was appointed the additional solicitor general in 1989.
A four-term Rajya Sabha member, Jaitley served as the leader of the opposition in the upper House from 2009-2014. A man of varied interests, he also served as the president of the Delhi District Cricket Association (DDCA).
Arun Jaitley in Parliament to present the Union Budget in 2018 | Manvender Vashist | PTI File Photo
It was during his stint as finance minister that one of the biggest tax reforms — the goods and services tax (GST) — was rolled out in 2017. It was also on his watch that the Modi government merged the railway budget with the general budget.
Jaitley was also known to be a key electoral strategist for his party — managing crucial behind-the-scenes aspects in several elections, including the 2002 and 2007 Gujarat assembly polls, both of which the BJP won.
Put in charge of Karnataka in 2003, he helped the party win 83 of the state’s 224 assembly seats — no mean feat for a party with a negligible presence in the south. He also helped chalk out election strategies for other states, including, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh among others.
The controversies
As is the norm in politics, Jaitley had his share of controversies. In August 2014, for instance, soon after the Modi government came to office, an insensitive statement by him drew much flak.
“One small incident of rape in Delhi advertised world over is enough to cost us billions of dollars in terms of global tourism,” Jaitley said at a tourism ministers’ conference, in reference to the December 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder.
After much outrage over the inappropriate nature of his comment, he expressed “regret” and said it wasn’t his intention to be insensitive.
There were a few controversies from his days as finance minister too.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah| PTI File Photo
In September last year, fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya, accused of fraud and money laundering, among other things, claimed he had met FM Jaitley to “settle matters” before he fled India. This gave the opposition easy fodder to attack the Modi government, embarrassing the latter. Jaitley, however, described the statement as “factually false”, saying the meeting was a brief encounter at the Rajya Sabha that lasted a few minutes.
It was also when Jaitley was at the helm of affairs at the Finance Ministry that the government-RBI tussle precipitated into an ugly, public fight, amid allegations that the Modi administration was curtailing the central bank’s autonomy. In October 2018, Jaitley openly blamed the RBI for India’s bad loans problem.
Jaitley may have had many strengths, but being a mass leader was never one of them. This was unlikely for a party like the BJP, known for its grounded, mass leaders. It was always through the Rajya Sabha route that he entered Parliament.
Jaitley finally tried his hand at direct elections in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, contesting from the prestigious Amritsar seat, but lost to Congress stalwart and now Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.
A fan of adding a drizzle of poetry to his Parliament speeches, Jaitley, in his 2016-17 Budget address, borrowed a verse to underscore his government’s determination to fight against the odds.
“Kashti chalaane walon ne jab haar kar di patwar hamein, Lehar lehar toofan mile aur mauj mauj manjdhaar hamein. Phir bhi dikhaya hai humne, aur phir yeh dikha denge sabko, In halato mein aata hai daria karna paar humein (When exhausted sailors handed the oar of the boat to us, we found storms and rapids. But we showed and will continue to show everyone that, even in these conditions, we know how to cross the river,” Jaitley said.
As his party loses two veterans and key foundations in a short span, it will look back at these words to draw motivation and amp up its zeal.
