Arun Jaitley's India: A pol's stump handbook

The thoughts of the former finance minister compiled in a book could prove to be a handy guide for the many BJP spokespersons for their public and media appearances

A New India: Selected Writings 2014-19

Author: Arun Jaitley

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages:  x+374 pp

Price: Rs 699

“Arun Jaitley was a truly multi-faceted personality.  A friend to many, excellent legal mind, effective minister, consummate communicator,…public intellectual with immense grasp on (sic) policy issues,” writes Narendra Modi in his foreword to this collection of writings of his first finance minister. He has good reasons to wax eloquent about his friend and colleague.  The future prime minister was sent to Delhi as a raw Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak in 1979.  Jaitley was an early friend.  Although a couple of years younger than Mr Modi, Jaitley became his mentor in the hurly burly of the capital.  That role continued even after 2014. 

The new prime minister was a self-confessed outsider in Lutyens’ Delhi. Jaitley was a card-carrying member of it, given his family background, education and legal profession despite his Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politics and became Mr Modi’s willing and able sherpa.  He was also the prime minister’s go-to person in the early days of the first Modi government, when he held many responsibilities, including defence, corporate affairs and information and broadcasting in addition to his finance ministership.  Their relationship was quite similar to the one between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh in the first National Democratic Alliance government.

The work under review is divided into six parts, namely Mr Modi’s leadership, the reforms the new government ushered in, dynastic politics, the continuing losses of the opposition, the Emergency and some anecdotes.

Jaitley had a stellar supporting cast of advisers and administrators:

Arvind Panagariya at the NITI Aayog,  Raghuram Rajan at the Reserve Bank and Arvind Subramanian as the chief economic adviser were a formidable combination unmatched in recent history.  The bureaucrats included such stalwarts as Rajiv Takru, Shaktikanta Das, Hasmukh Adhia and Subhash Chandra Garg, among others. Yet their collective achievement of enacting the Goods and Services Tax in 2017 is overshadowed by the disaster of the demonetisation of the previous year.  Jaitley’s defence of the two measures, in two chapters of the book, is a collection of shibboleths we have heard many times, and neither definitive nor convincing. Two factors could explain this: One, he was an inactive participant (as in demonetisation) and, two, his own grasp of the key issues was not all that thorough.  His tribute to Dr Subramanian on the latter’s departure from the government in 2018 is quite superficial, something not expected in view of their close association of three years-plus.  That supports the suspicion the legal eagle was perhaps somewhat out of his depth in the world of economics and finance.

This reviewer read the two parts dealing with the Emergency and the writer’s anecdotes with much interest, as he expected them to be full of insights.  Jaitley was a prominent student activist in the 1970s and among the early detainees of the Emergency.  Yet his recollections are mostly repetitions of the commonplace, showing little reflection despite the passage of four decades.  His anecdotes include short sketches of Vajpayee, George Fernandes, Jagmohan Dalmia and Mr Adhia among others.  One would have expected the list to include Lal Krishna Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi, his early mentors in the Vajpayee government, later colleagues such as Sushma Swaraj or Venkaiah Naidu, luminaries from the legal fraternity as also cricket, given his long associations with these activities.  The sketches do not go beyond what is already well-known about the subjects, indicating a lack of depth or absence of reflection on the part of the writer.

The main reason for these glaring lapses is the very nature of the work.  Bunging in blogs on diverse subjects between covers does not result in a book.  Stars of opinion pages sometimes publish collections of their columns as books but, almost invariably, that does not work because of the short length and the time-bound nature of individual pieces.  Collections of blogs would fare even worse, because their writers seldom have the time or inclination for anything beyond shallow analyses.

The present work is marred further by an absence of editorial oversight bar collecting the blogs into chapters and sections.  There is no clue at all as to who has undertaken this enterprise.  Errors of language, syntax and, occasionally, even facts pop up at various places.  Worse, tiresome repetitions are not checked.  Vajpayee is the specific subject of at least three of the blogs.  He is also the subject of numerous references.  Many of these are repeats of each other.

Why, then, this compilation and why now?  One reason could be that this is a handy guide to the many BJP spokespersons for their public and media appearances, always imminent in view of some approaching election or the other.  But even here, burning issues of the day — inflation, unemployment, exchange rates — are prominent by their absence.

This is a pity. Jaitley was an important politician, the early eminence grise of Mr Modi.  He had a distinguished legal career and was a keen sports enthusiast and administrator.  Above all, he was that rarity in the present political world, a decent and gentle human being.  He deserved a better book, which this reviewer hopes is not too long in coming.