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In 2012, two years before Arun Jaitley became the most important minister in Narendra Modi's cabinet, the news that the ruling United Progressive Alliance's allocation of coal blocks may have cost the government thousands of crores and unfairly benefitted private interests, incapacitated Parliament's monsoon session. Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarians threatened to resign en masse, and Jaitley, then the BJP's opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha, aggressively spoke out against what he called "the biggest scam in independent India." As the stymied parliament session ground to a halt that August, Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, his counterpart in the Lok Sabha, released a fierce joint statement. "We used this session of parliament to shake the conscience of the people of India," they wrote. In a press conference, Jaitley called the allocation process "arbitrary," "discretionary," and "corrupt", "a textbook case of crony capitalism." In an opinion piece in The Hindu, titled "Defending the Indefensible," he wrote.
"The government was so overenthusiastic in continuing the discretionary process in allotment" that it did not institute the "competitive bidding mechanism" that would have ensured a more just process of allocation.
A few years earlier, Jaitley had offered a different type of opinion to Strategic Energy Technology Systems Private Limited, an ambitious joint venture between Tata Sons and a South African firm, in his capacity as a practising lawyer. When applying for coal blocks in 2008, SETSPL, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the allocation process, sought Jaitley's advice on whether it could avoid sharing a certain part of its profits with the government. Jaitley provided the company with a 21-page legal opinion, via the law offices of his college friend Raian Karanjawala, recognising that "the Govt. of India is entitled to adopt a procedure for allocation of coal blocks," and that the company was not legally bound to share the proposed profits with the government. Jaitley's arguments in support of SETSPL indicated that he had been well aware of the prevailing coal block allocation process despite his hue and cry about "the monumental fraud".
Shortly after the coal scam broke, the legal opinion was made available to the press by one or more UPA ministers. As the BJP fanned the flames of protest against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - alleging that he had allowed controversial allocations under his watch as coal minister - the leaked opinion, a potential hot tip, became a hot potato. The document was passed around between journalists, including senior staff at the Times of India, the Economic Times, Headlines Today, NDTV and CNBC. But in each case, the story of Jaitley's inconsistent outrage was withheld. A mid-level journalist at Headlines Today said that the office of P Chidambaram, the union home minister at the time, gave the channel the story of the leak as "an exclusive," and that it ran once before being taken off air. The journalist was told by his senior, who said he had spoken to Jaitley, that though he believed in "the merits of the story", Jaitley had argued the leaked document was "a private opinion". "I have always believed what the editor thinks is right," the journalist said, smiling, "so I said okay." Another journalist who had the document told me that Jaitley wrote a letter to the vice-president, who is chairman of the Rajya Sabha, complaining "that the intelligence agencies were trying to tarnish his reputation. The vice-president's office had confirmed it to me," the journalist said. "The bureau chief wanted Jaitley's comment, but he wasn't willing to talk about the issue at all. So the story was not carried." Only one journalist actually spoke to Jaitley about the opinion, but colleagues who knew about the interview, which never ran, said he was unsatisfied with Jaitley's answers. The journalist didn't want to share details of the meeting to avoid "creating discomfort" to his colleagues. "And remember he is the finance minister," he said. "I don't want to upset him." A year later, the story of the legal opinion finally appeared, but on the non-mainstream news website Altgaze, without the impact it might have had earlier. Several journalists joked with me about Jaitley having rustled up the "Jaitley Press Corps" - a twist on the Joint Parliamentary Committee - to quell the news.
In a notoriously tight-lipped regime, Jaitley is, to a great extent, entrusted with speaking. He has always loved to hold court, and his door is typically wider ajar than those of his colleagues in the party. The Telegraph described a typical encounter in an interview with Jaitley, freshly glowing from his success in managing the 2008 Karnataka assembly elections. "Jaitley puts his feet up, settling down for his ritual informal chat with journalists after the daily press briefing. That's when the gregarious college boy in Jaitley comes to the fore. His sharp political insights are then peppered with pithy one-liners, jokes which have him convulsing with laughter more than his assembled audience. He occasionally mimics other politicians."
A news editor called Jaitley "a raconteur who can regale you with great stories and nuggets of information. It can make you feel part of the club - a heady drug for all journalists and a validation that you are part of something important." A political editor of a leading newspaper said, "He wouldn't mind sharing very personal details of his friends for the entertainment of others." The political editor told me, "I am not a BJP-friendly reporter. And I have not been nice to him in print." But Jaitley "continues to be friendly to me".
Yet access to Jaitley's durbar comes with its own set of challenges, and some journalists argued that there is a quid pro quo involved. A veteran journalist, who has covered BJP for 30 years, told me "Either you are with him completely and planted stories on Rajnath and Sushma" - Rajnath Singh, former BJP president and current minister of home affairs; and Sushma Swaraj, now minister of external affairs -" otherwise his doors will still be open and you can have tea but he will give you no information whatsoever." Another political editor, who has also covered BJP since the 1980s, noted that Jaitley's anecdotes "may not yield a story immediately ... but if you tuck it away at the back of your mind, you can join the dots and complete the picture some other time." The news editor described Jaitley's slightly distracted manner of talking as a "classic power move" to disorient people and keep them guessing as to whether the information they have is important or not. "You can't pin him down on any topic," the senior journalist at the daily paper said. "He controls the terms and conditions of the discussion." (Jaitley did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Caravan, nor to a list of questions sent to him.)
A journalist repeated a joke he heard from the editor and former BJP MP and cabinet minister Arun Shourie, that Jaitley is a mass leader - with a mass base of six journalists. Yet his influence belies this as understatement; only a handful of the 68 people I spoke to, most of them journalists or politicians, were willing to talk about Jaitley on the record. "Half the Delhi claims to know you," a television journalist told me he once remarked to Jaitley, who reportedly replied, "Half the Delhi won't be lying."
In the past, Jaitley's projection of himself as modern, moderate and liberal - traits that appeal to a certain segment of Delhi's journalistic, business and intellectual elite - have evoked suspicion among more hard-line members of the BJP, and its ideological affiliate, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. … Yet his upper-class smoothness has also made him invaluable as BJP expands. In 1999, journalist Swapan Dasgupta (who declined to be interviewed, citing his friendship with Jaitley), wrote in India Today that "In a party plagued by an image problem, he made BJP respectable among the chattering classes and was rewarded." He predicted, "As BJP moves from the fringes to becoming a liberal, right-wing party, the Sangh Parivar will look to him as a winning face of the next century." Jaitley's friend Virendra Kapoor, a journalist and an RSS loyalist, told me Jaitley hates the label, often attached to him, of being the "right man in the wrong party". A prominent lobbyist in Delhi, referring to Jaitley's indignation over the coal scam, told me one "part of him is public - that is liberal and modern". The other "is the shrewd strategist side that you don't get to see." Explaining how Jaitley has stayed so close to the centre of power over the last several decades, the lobbyist drew a contrast between him and the prime minister. "Modi rules by fear," he said, "and Jaitley by favour."
Jaitley was eminently suited to the high-visibility positions of BJP spokesperson and information minister. Sri Ram Khanna, who had drafted Jaitley into the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), told me that Jaitley began making inroads into the press back then. "We would go to newspaper offices to give out press releases," he said. "That's how we learnt our media relations." By the time he became minister, Jaitley's list of friends in the press was extensive. He had built relationships with media houses, including Ramnath Goenka's Indian Express Group and Times of India publisher Bennett, Coleman and Co Ltd, as their legal counsel, and was also on the board of Hindustan Times. Television news was changing the way politics was conducted. As Swapan Dasgupta noted in 1999, "as TV grew in importance, so did Jaitley." He became such a popular guest that when journalist Vir Sanghvi interviewed him on Star TV soon after his ministerial appointment, he quipped, "It is unusual for me to have on this programme a guest who has done more television than I have."
Even the rare critical article acknowledged his abilities; a November 2003 India Today article, headlined 'Under Scrutiny,' said, "Suave, urbane, articulate, Jaitley's public face is mostly visible in television studios, aggressively defending the government on a wide range of issues, where his sharp legal brain is an obvious asset." This public face was ballasted by a fund of private information. "No two persons can have an affair in Delhi that Jaitley won't know about," the veteran journalist who has covered BJP for 30 years said. In his memoir Editor Unplugged, Vinod Mehta wrote that "although hung up on upward political mobility and, possibly, the biggest gossip in Delhi," Jaitley "likes the company of literate journalists and keeps himself well informed." When Mehta's Outlook magazine did a cover story on "India's Best Gossips," in 2009, Jaitley took top spot. "For the lawyer-politician, gossip is not just social currency or amusement, it is a genuine passion," the piece said. "Journalists lucky enough to be invited into his inner circle say ... he entertains them with his rich fund of stories about the private lives of everyone, including journalists and editors."
RSS member Alok Kumar said Jaitley had "the ability to sift people according to their importance and build up on all those who matter". Of all the relationships Jaitley has nurtured over the years, his careful friendship with Modi - going back to when Modi was an ambitious pracharak from Gujarat - has paid the richest dividends, even if it may be built on a foundation of mutual benefit rather than trust. In many ways, the two complement each other: one a popular leader, the other with an elite following; one an outsider to Delhi, the other the consummate insider. In 1995, when BJP came to power in Gujarat and Modi was sent to work in Delhi, Jaitley was among the people he cultivated. A senior editor who considers Modi a friend told me that "Jaitley is the quintessential networker in Delhi, so he would take care of Modi like he would take care of a raft of people. But nobody else did that to Modi and nobody took him seriously at that time." Many journalists and BJP leaders remember Modi as a regular visitor to Jaitley's house in south Delhi. Lawyer Dushyant Dave, who shared an office with Jaitley between 1992 and 1997, told me Modi visited there as well. In 1999, Modi and Jaitley expressed their admiration for each other on two episodes of Rajeev Shukla's television show Rubaru. Modi dated their relationship to the JP movement, and described Jaitley as "a rare combination in politics," an "activist, an intellectual, articulate, very clean, and also a very friendly man". When Shukla subsequently interviewed Jaitley about Modi, Jaitley returned the compliments, calling Modi a "tough taskmaster," a "disciplinarian" and a "creative" politician.
This is an extract reprinted with permission from The Caravan, May 2015 © Delhi Press. www.caravanmagazine.in
