Modi 2.0 will miss trouble-shooter Arun Jaitley’s sagacity

Anand Kochukudy

The artful Arun Jaitley was a man of many parts — lawyer, politician, master communicator and a lot more. However, Jaitley’s biggest contribution to Indian polity, more specifically to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is the behind-the-scenes role he played in the spectacular rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Jaitley first came to prominence as a student leader of the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in the 1970s — he went on to win the election to the students union in 1974 as president. Jaitley also served a prison term of 19 months during the Emergency. Having enrolled as a lawyer in 1977, politics took a back seat for Jaitley although he continued to be associated with politics, from the ABVP to the Yuva Morcha to the Delhi unit of the BJP in the early eighties.

In 1989, at the age of 37, Jaitley was made additional solicitor general by the VP Singh government. Although he made it to the national executive of the BJP in 1991, Jaitley became a full-time politician only in 1999, when he was deputed a spokesperson for the BJP, ahead of the general elections that year. Soon, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee appointed Jaitley as the Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting (Independent Charge), and for the next two decades he remained an active politician.

Along with scripting his own personal success, Jaitley’s political acumen and foresight saw him playing a vital role in the transformation of Modi from a chief minister of a state (Gujarat) to the harbinger of Achhe Din for the entire nation.

The duo go back a long way, and their special bond saw Jaitley quitting the Vajpayee Cabinet in 2002 to help strategise Modi to win the Gujarat assembly election that year, apart from providing legal advice in the wake of the riots.

For a while in the mid-2000s, Jaitley’s name figured along with Pramod Mahajan’s and Sushma Swaraj’s, as the most promising second-generation leaders of the BJP. However, despite becoming the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha 2009, Jaitley was wise enough to realise his own limitations, and he was instrumental in Narendra Modi’s emergence as the prime ministerial candidate in 2013, despite staunch opposition from veteran LK Advani.

At first glance, Modi and Jaitley seem like chalk and cheese — the latter, a typical Lutyens’ elite, the kind Narendra Modi railed against and promised to side-line from the corridors of power upon assuming charge. Instead, it was Jaitley who played a massive role during Modi’s initial days in Delhi as PM, and pretty much the only person Modi took counsel. Not happy with the importance Jaitley was enjoying in the Modi Cabinet, some Right-wing voices unsuccessfully tried to drive a wedge between the two.

After losing in the general election —the only election he ever contested — from Amritsar in 2014 to Captain Amarinder Singh, Jaitley was given charge of both the key ministries of finance and defence, apart from information & broadcasting (I&B) and corporate affairs in the first Narendra Modi government. Although he relinquished the defence and I&B portfolios later, his stint in these ministries signified his importance to the scheme of things.

Jaitley’s extraordinary talent to rationalise the most difficult of arguments with utmost conviction, perhaps honed through his long stint as a lawyer, came to the BJP’s aid in many situations. Although Jaitley has often described himself as socially liberal, there was never any doubt about his ideological or political convictions, especially coming from a family that settled in Delhi during the Partition days.

The telegenic Jaitley was a darling of the media and irrespective of the media or language, Jaitley’s compelling presence commanded respect. Jaitley was a trouble-shooter and strategist for the BJP for two decades, and he will be missed, especially in the Modi 2.0 government.

Jaitley was a self-confessed foodie and a diabetic. Over the years, his health was not at its peak. In 2018, he underwent a renal transplant. Earlier in 2019, he had another surgery, which prevented him from presenting the interim election budget in February.