Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley passes away

New Delhi, August 24, 2019 : Senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and former Union Minister Arun Jaitley (66) passed today. He was admitted for treatment in All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi since August 9.

Jaitley was put on life support system at AIIMS for the past several days. In order to know about his health, many prominent leaders including PM Narendra Modi, President Ram Nath Kovind visited the hospital in recent times.

Kidney transplant operation was done in May 2018

Jaitley has been running ill for a long time. Due to illness, he did not join the Modi cabinet after the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. Arun Jaitley’s had successful operation of kidney transplant at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on 14 May 2018. He had stopped coming to the ministry since early April 2018. During this period, Piyush Goyal was holding to the charge of the Ministry of Finance.

Bariatric operation in September 2014

Arun Jaitley underwent a bariatric operation in September 2014. This operation was done to diagnose weight gain problem due to diabetes for a long time. This operation first took place at Max Hospital. However, he was later shifted to AIIMS due to some problems. A few years ago he also had a heart operation.

Early life

Arun Jaitley was born on 28 December 1952 at New Delhi. His father Maharaj Kishen Jaitley was a lawyer and mother Ratan Prabha Jaitley a housewife. He studied at St. Xavier’s School, Delhi from 1957–69. He graduated with a honours degree in commerce, BCom from Shri Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi in 1973. He passed his LLB degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, in 1977.

Jaitley was an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) student leader at the Delhi University Campus in the seventies and rose to be the President of the Students Union of Delhi University in 1974. During the period of proclamation of Internal Emergency (1975–77) when fundamental rights were suspended, he was under preventive detention for a period of 19 months. He was a prominent leader of a movement against corruption launched in the year 1973 by Raj Narain and Jayaprakash Narayan. He was the Convenor of the National Committee for Students and Youth organization appointed by Jai Prakash Narayan. He was also active in civil rights movement and helped found PUCL Bulletin along with Satish Jha and Smitu Kothari. After being released from jail he joined the Jan Sangh.

In 1977, being the convener of the Loktantric Yuva Morcha at a time when the Congress suffered defeat, Jaitley was appointed the president of the Delhi ABVP and All India Secretary of the ABVP. He was then made the president of the youth wing of the BJP and the secretary of the Delhi Unit in 1980, a short time after joining the party.

Legal career

Jaitley with Former Supreme Court Judge K.S. Panicker Radhakrishnan at the Gujarat National Law University. Jaitley has been practising law before the Supreme Court of India and several High Courts in the country since 1987. In January 1990, Delhi High Court designated him as a Senior Advocate.

He was appointed Additional Solicitor General by the V. P. Singh government in 1989 and did the paperwork for the investigations into the Bofors scandal. His clients cover the political spectrum from Sharad Yadav of the Janata Dal to Madhavrao Scindia of the Indian National Congress to LK Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has authored several publications on legal and current affairs. He has presented a paper on law relating to corruption and crime in India before the Indo-British Legal Forum. He was a delegate on behalf of the Government of India to the United Nations General Assembly Session in June 1998 where the Declaration on Laws Relating to Drugs and Money Laundering was approved.

Jaitley has also appeared on behalf of giant multinational corporations such as PepsiCo against Coca-Cola and in various other cases in India. After having been the Minister of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, Jaitley represented Pepsi in 2002 in a case where the Supreme Court of India admonished and imposed stiff fines on 8 companies for painting advertisements on ecologically fragile rocks along the Manali-Rohtang road in the Himalayas. “The companies were also issued show-cause notices as to why exemplary damages should not be imposed on them for indulging in environmental vandalism.”In 2004, Jaitley appeared on behalf of Coca-Cola in a Rajasthan High Court case.

Given his political duties as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Jaitley stopped practising law in June 2009.

Political career

Jaitley has been a member of the national executive of Bharatiya Janata Party since 1991. He became the spokesperson of the BJP during the period preceding the 1999 general election.

Vajpayee Government

In 1999, after the Vajpayee Government of the BJP led National Democratic Alliance came to power, he was appointed Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting (Independent Charge) on 13 October 1999. He was also appointed Minister of State for Disinvestment (Independent Charge), a new ministry created for the first time to give effect to the policy of disinvestments under the World Trade Organization regime. He took over the additional charge of the Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs on 23 July 2000 following the resignation of Ram Jethmalani as the Union Cabinet Minister of Law, Justice and Company Affairs.

He was elevated to a Cabinet Minister in November 2000 and was made simultaneously the Minister of Law, Justice and Company Affairs and Shipping. He was the first Minister of Shipping following the bifurcation of the Ministry of Surface Transport. He demitted the office of the Minister for Shipping with effect from 1 September 2001 and as Union Minister of Law, Justice and Company Affairs on 1 July 2002 to join as a General Secretary of the BJP and its national spokesman. He worked in this capacity till January 2003. He rejoined the Union Cabinet as the Minister of Commerce & Industry and Law & Justice on 29 January 2003. With the defeat of the National Democratic Alliance in May 2004, Jaitley returned to serving the BJP as a general secretary, and back to his legal career.

2004-2014

He was chosen as the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha on 3 June 2009 by L.K. Advani. On 16 June 2009, he resigned from the post of General Secretary of BJP as per his party’s One Man One Post principle. He is also a member of the Central Election Committee of the party. In his capacity as the leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha, he played a vital role during the talks of the Women Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha and also supported Anna Hazare for the Jan Lokpal Bill. He successfully introduced the eighty-fourth amendment to the Constitution of India in 2002 freezing parliamentary seats until 2026 and the ninety-first amendment to the Constitution of India in 2004 penalising defections. However, being in the party since 1980 he never contested any direct election until 2014. He was the BJP candidate for the Amritsar seat in the Lok Sabha (replacing Navjot Singh Sidhu) for the 2014 general election, but lost to the Indian National Congress candidate Amarinder Singh. He was a Rajya Sabha member from Gujarat. He was re-elected to Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh in March 2018.

On August 26, 2012, he said (outside Parliament) “There are occasions when an obstruction in Parliament brings greater benefits to the country.” This statement is considered to have given legitimacy to obstruction of parliament in the contemporary politics in India. After forming government in 2014 BJP government has also faced disruptions and obstructions in parliament multiple numbers of times and opposition keeps on referring to his aforesaid statement. While his contribution to parliamentary discussion is exemplary but his support of obstruction as a legitimate floor strategy undoes his positive contribution to the Indian Parliamentary Democracy.

NDA led Government of India

On 26 May 2014, Jaitley was selected by newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be the Minister of Finance, the Minister for Corporate Affairs and the Minister of Defence, in his cabinet. Analysts cited Jaitley’s “part-time” focus on defence as a simple continuation of the policies of the previous government. According to a WikiLeaks cable by Robert Blake, the Charge at the US Embassy, to his government, when pressed on the question of Hindutva, Jaitley had argued that Hindu nationalism “will always be a talking point” for the BJP and characterised this as an opportunistic issue. Jaitely later clarified that “the use of the word opportunistic in reference to nationalism or Hindu nationalism is neither my view nor my language. It could be the diplomat’s own usage.”

During the 2015 Bihar Legislative Assembly election, Arun Jaitley agreed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertions that the idea of reservations on the basis of religion is fraught with danger and was against giving reservations to Muslim Dalits and Christian Dalits as it might impact demography. He also serves as a member to the Board of Governors of Asian Development Bank.

In November 2015, Jaitley said that personal laws governing marriages and divorces should be subject to fundamental rights, as constitutionally-guaranteed rights are supreme. He announced the Income declaration scheme, 2016 in September 2016.

During his tenure as the Finance Minister of India, the government demonetized the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 banknotes of the Mahatma Gandhi Series, with the stated intention of curbing corruption, black money, fake currency, and terrorism from 9 November 2016. On June 20, 2017, he reaffirmed that the GST rollout is well and truly on track.

On May 29, 2019, in a letter to Prime Minister Modi, Arun Jaitley cited his health as a reason for not taking an active role in the formation of the new government, effectively declining a role as a minister in the second term of Prime Minister Modi.

Personal life

Arun Jaitley married Sangeeta, daughter of former Jammu and Kashmir finance minister Girdhari Lal Dogra, in 1982. They have two children, Rohan and Sonali; the latter married Jaiyesh Bakhshi. Both his children are lawyers. He has two siblings. His niece Ridhi Dogra and nephew Akshay Dogra are Indian television actors.