CAPITAL LETTER. Arun Jaitley and his frenemies

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has enjoyed a smooth run so far. The media loves him. The industry is still cautious in articulating anxieties. And it looks like the main Opposition, the Congress, is not given to thinking politically. So in the parliamentary select committee, the principal opposition party backed the Insurance Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2008 raising the FDI cap from 26 to 49 per cent.

And even with the states expressing strong reservations about the draft GST Constitutional Amendment Bill -- especially the provisions including petroleum products under the Goods and Services Tax ambit -- the media houses that matter are still maintaining that the Finance Minister has “swung into action”; that his considerable powers of persuasion will help bring about a consensus on the crucial legislation.

It is interesting that most of these reports do not, even cursorily, mention Jaitley’s own track record in facilitating the passage of these legislations when he was Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. “You send your CBI after our Chief Minister and expect us to help you out in GST?” he would ask in the face of his predecessor government’s protracted efforts to push legislative business in successive Parliament sessions.

But while the Congress and the media are easily tackled, it is quite another matter dealing with what I call the Jaitley Picketers — elements in his own party and friends-turned-foes who can never forgive the Finance Minister his stupendous career graph.

The foremost among them, his former colleague Jaswant Singh, is indisposed. Another one of his predecessors-cum-Picketer in the Finance Ministry — Yashwant Sinha — is, well, part neutralised. His son Jayant Sinha is now Jaitley’s junior minister in the Finance Department. And Sinha himself is among the lot of former bureaucrats who manage to get something in every regime. Let us just say he may still have not given up hopes of a future employment yet.

Singh and Sinha were among the few top leaders in the BJP who raised the red flag against Jaitley in 2009. Jaitley was managing elections for LK Advani, who was Prime Ministerial candidate at the time. When the BJP fared even worse than they had in 2004, implosions rocked the party.

Singh circulated a note in an internal meeting of the BJP asserting that there is no connection between “performance and reward” in the BJP. Loosely translated, it meant asking Advani to explain why Jaitley was made Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha after he had supervised a failed election.

Sinha too expressed similar sentiments in a letter on June 12, 2009: “…It appears as if some people in the party are determined to ensure that the principle of accountability does not prevail so that their own little perch is not disturbed. Separately, in our anxiety to distribute amongst the few higher mortals in the party whatever goodies were available, we completely disregarded the parliamentary party constitution in the election of the office-bearers of the parliamentary party on May 31. It is difficult to avoid the impression that in the BJP we put a premium on failure.”

But Sinha has clearly bought peace with Jaitley or is in the process of doing so.

That still leaves out the most lethal among the Picketers — Ram Jethmalani, Subramanian Swamy and Arun Shourie, men who were among the first to demand that Narendra Modi be projected as Prime Ministerial candidate for the BJP. They are also men who have been largely ignored in government-formation, owing to the “age criterion”.

It is said that the generational change in the BJP has meant that people above/around the 75-year-old mark are generally not being appointed either in the party or the government.

While Shourie has publicly trashed the “age factor” in appointments, the prevalent view in the party circles is that besides age, their public profile, forthright views and the tendency to speak out may have prevented their elevation in the government/party ranks.

Given that Jaitley is the only BJP leader with any real clout in the Modi regime and that there is no love lost between him and these three men, it is also universally accepted that the Finance Minister may have had something to do with their lack of employment.

Shourie has so far nuanced his criticism of the government and Jaitley. “…The reduction of oil prices has put blinkers on people’s eyes and has delayed a reality check. Otherwise, the targeted deficit would have been consumed, a reality check would have come,” he told The Indian Express staff on December 7, 2014. But he is also a man who called for the “bombard the headquarters” and “clean up the top” after the BJP’s loss in the 2009 elections.

With the industrial output contracting to 4.2 per cent in October and a negative growth being forecast for the agricultural sector, it is only a matter of time before the criticism gets more pronounced.

The signs are ominous with Ram Jethmalani already leading the pack to hound the government on the black money issue. The target of attack is, clearly, the Finance Minister.

Jethmalani has written a letter to Jaitley on October 23, accusing him of taking an “ill advised” stand on black money. “I strongly suspect that your conduct shows that you too, like many others, do not want the truth to come out,” he said.

“Your action in approaching the Supreme Court with the kind of petition that you have filed is one of the most ill advised steps taken.” It transpires that Subramanian Swamy, who is now in the BJP, too has written a letter to the Prime Minister asserting that the stand taken by the Finance Minister on not disclosing the names of the foreign bank account holders is not valid.

It doesn’t help the Finance Minister that the writer/academic Madhu Kishwar has joined Jethmalani’s ranks in attacking him. Fortunately for Jaitley, Kishwar’s charges against him get clouded in the steam of her angst at the continuation in the Human Resource Development Ministry of Smriti Irani. Kishwar was the first to flag the issue of the anomalies in the Education Minister’s two election affidavits about her educational qualifications but it has not, at least so far, affected the Minister.

From what it looks like, the Jaitley Picketers will only gather more steam as the grand promises in the run-up to the elections meet the same obstacles as the much-touted ‘Make in India’ declaration on the Independence Day.

And I have not yet come to the other set of the Finance Minister’s friends whose preoccupation with gossip can only inflict injury.