In a tribute to Arun Jaitley, transport and shipping minister Nitin Gadkari pointed out that the two of them shared many traits. While drawing attention to their common love for food, he further maintained that “both of us did not carry our political battles beyond the battlefield”.
Though everyone who condoled Jaitley’s demise referred to how he forged and nurtured friendships across the political divide, Gadkari’s throwaway comment is worth taking note of. At one level, it is a compliment to Jaitley for not allowing his differences with political rivals to impact his personal relationship with them. But the Union minister’s one-liner is also an indirect pointer to how political discourse has now degenerated into personalised attacks and name-calling.
Like Sushma Swaraj, Ananth Kumar, M Venkaiah Naidu and a host of other leaders, Jaitley was also mentored by veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani.
In fact, Jaitley publicly acknowledged that it was from Advani that he had learned to focus on issues while taking on political opponents instead of launching a personal offensive against them.
This advice clearly served Jaitley and the BJP well, as the party leaned on him to reach out to the opposition in case of an impasse in Parliament in Modi’s first term.
This was equally true of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, which also depended on Jaitley to reason with his party colleagues when the two sides were locked in confrontation.
It was, therefore, not unusual for Jaitley to speak with pride about his warm ties with Congress leader Anand Sharma with the two of them having shared a room when they visited Russia as members of a youth delegation.
Or his long association with Ghulam Nabi Azad, whose house in Delhi was the starting point of Jaitley’s baraat when he married Sangeeta, daughter of Girdhari Lal Dogra, a Congress leader from Jammu. And Rajiv Shukla topped the list of guests at all family functions at the Jaitley household.
The BJP leader’s enduring friendship with former Union finance minister P Chidambaram was an open secret in Delhi. Little wonder that Jaitley would often jocularly remark that he had more friends in the opposition than his own party.
It was a result of Advani’s imprint on the party that when reports about Robert Vadra’s land deal first surfaced, both Sushma Swaraj and Jaitley, who were opposition leaders in Parliament, decided to ignore them on the plea that their political battles should not extend to “family members”.
Clearly, the BJP has come a long way since then. The arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah on the national political stage saw a sea change in the rules of engagement with the opposition.
The old system of peaceful coexistence between the party in power and the opposition has been discarded, leaving no scope for striking compromises. Mutual suspicion is the name of the game now. Consequently, leaders of every opposition party, including P Chidambaram and Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are today under the scanner by investigative agencies.
Relatives of opposition leaders are also in the firing line. Vadra’s controversial land deals became the centrepiece of the BJP’s campaign against the Congress party’s first family, and Chidambaram’s son Karti Chidambaram is embroiled in multiple inquiries over his business dealings. Congress treasurer Ahmed Patel’s son and son-in-law are being questioned by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case.
Jaitley also found himself hemmed in after the Modi-Shah duo redrew the battlelines between the BJP and the opposition.
The affable BJP leader was constrained from openly acknowledging his friendship with Chidambaram, especially after his detractors in the party launched a whisper campaign suggesting that Jaitley was “protecting his friend” by ensuring that the cases being pursued against the former finance minister progressed at snail’s pace.
So much so, Jaitley was denied control over the Enforcement Directorate and other such agencies under the finance ministry, as it was taken over by his political bosses.
It is anybody’s guess if it was a coincidence that Chidambaram’s troubles mounted after Jaitley was forced to take a break from his ministerial duties because of his health problems. Maybe, it is a further coincidence that Chidambaram was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation barely a few days before Jaitley passed away.
It is also being said that now that the BJP has a formidable majority in Parliament and Modi and Shah are comfortably settled in Delhi, they no longer require the “Jaitley touch”.
In any case, it is difficult to imagine present-day BJP leaders like Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman and Smriti Irani setting aside their political differences and indulging in light-hearted banter with opposition leaders over a cup of coffee, after battling each other on the floor of Parliament.
(The writer is a senior journalist. This column will appear every fortnight)