Arun Jaitley's office defines him: there are no pictures of gods and goddesses, only framed replicas of legal certificates and mementos from various cricket associations, the two loves of his life.
How can a man who is so clearly proud of his legal training and so fond of cricket that he named his son Rohan, reconcile himself to the company of the rabble-rousing mob that brought down the Babri Masjid in 1992?
He said in an interview to Business Standard once: "If you ask me, personally, I cannot justify what happened on December 6, 1992 at Ayodhya". But he was clear on his association with the Sangh Parivar. "I am integrated into the family ideologically, personally and emotionally," he said, explaining that he has never shifted political loyalties…
Jaitley describes himself as a liberal political activist grounded in law, ethics and humanism. He is a practicing Hindu but believes in keeping religion private.
Jaitley belongs to a refugee family: his father was from Lahore while his mother's family was settled in Amritsar at a time when the two cities thought of themselves as twin cities. During the Partition, his mother, heavy with her first child (Jaitley's elder sister), had come to her parents' home for her delivery. His father would visit but when the family's first daughter was born in June 1946, amid the raging riots of the Partition, they decided to stay on in India and moved to Delhi in a house abandoned by a Muslim family and declared evacuee property.
His family are Brahmins from Punjab. As elsewhere in India, in Punjab too, the caste had little land, but placed tremendous premium on education. Jaitley's seven uncles were educated by his grandmother at a time when it was both expensive and hard to educate. So the extended family grew up to value good grades, but more than that, contributed to educate each other. All the brothers helped to fund the education of one of them who trained as a psychiatrist in the UK, studying in England to become an FRCS or Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. But mostly, they studied and practised law.
As part of this value system, the three children were sent to the best schools, boys and girls alike. Jaitley studied in a missionary school - St Xavier's - and although he opted for the science stream in school, believing ultimately that engineering was what he wanted to study, he joined the Bachelor of Commerce programme at the Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi University, following the advice of well-wishers to become a chartered accountant instead - that was a profession much in demand in those days. He could not have known how useful the skill of reading a balance sheet would be in the future.
By this time, Jaitley had already become an activist of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the youth wing of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. He had contested the local college union elections and ABVP was trying to persuade him to contest the Delhi University Students' Union election.
In 1974-75, this counted as an act of subversion. For 19 months, Jaitley, the promising young boy who seemed to have such a nice safe, middle-class future was pitchforked into the hurly-burly of underground politics. Rather than dodging the police, he opted for arrest in 1974 and was locked up for 19 months.
The Emergency ended and the 1977 election was announced. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee asked Jaitley to contest a Lok Sabha seat. But there was a problem: you needed to be 25 to contest and Jaitley was only 24 when he was released from jail.
In 1980, the Janata Party was defeated resoundingly in the elections. By then, Jaitley had already bid temporary adieu to politics and decided to concentrate on his legal career. He left the ABVP and got more and more involved in the law.
Jaitley's incarceration was not just a period of rest and reflection for him: it was one of the most formative phases of his life. He saw from close quarters all that was right with the system, that must be preserved from attacks from any quarters; but he also saw all that was wrong with it. He spelt this out: the talent available in politics was inversely proportional to the power politicians wielded. This was true of all parties. And, because no party had internal democracy, these men rose to dizzying heights in power politics, leaving no stone unturned in their pursuit to stay there.
Jail taught him another thing: a strong bias in favour of strengthening existing institutions, reform and rectification rather than abolition. Derived from the experience of the Emergency when constitutional freedoms were suspended, Jaitley is convinced that the judiciary should be strengthened, but not at the cost of other institutions and certainly not, beyond a point.
Will this man become India's finance minister ? The Akali Dal certainly thinks so. Jaitley was publicly named for the job at the first rally addressed by senior Akali leaders. But the man who will decide if India gives him that authority - Narendra Modi - did not spell it out so clearly. "Arun Jaitley will be of great help to our government in Delhi... If he (Jaitley) comes, it will benefit the Badal government," was what he said while campaigning for Jaitley in Amritsar.
At any rate, he is a man to watch.
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