Indias economic Sherpa

Arun Jaitley has carefully nursed the country's economy back to sound health. He is equally at home rubbing shoulders with the world's leading industrialists and investors in Davos, London and Singapore and inviting them to invest in India as he is strategising the nitty-gritty of how to win elections in hinterland Indian states. And all this when he isn't dispensing advice on some of the thorniest legal problems of the land. Meet Arun Jaitley, India's suave, erudite and very articulate Finance Minister, who is also one of the Bharatiya Janata Party's key political strategists and a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's inner circle of trusted advisors. Now, he has been given additional charge of the Defence Ministry following Manohar Parrikar's return to Goa as Chief Minister, clearly underlining his position as the Prime Minister's go-to man. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who cut their political teeth in the country's student movement during the dark days of Emergency as socialist, communist or Congress activists, Jaitley, who studied Bachelor of Commerce at Delhi's elite Shri Ram College of Commerce and then law at Delhi University, has been a lifelong BJP man who first came into prominence as president of the Delhi University Student's Union in the mid-70s. He is on record saying that the 19 months he spent in the high security Tihar Jail following a crackdown on pro-democracy activists by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government was a turning point in his life as he met people from all walks of life. Jaitley, who has retired from his very successful legal practice to concentrate fully on public service, also wears another ministerial hat - of Minister of Corporate Affairs - and has served as a minister in the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee as well. It was during his previous stint as Commerce Minister under Vajpayee that Jaitley set out New Delhi's principled stand at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations, refusing to open up India's domestic market to the West without a reciprocal reduction in farm subsidies by the rich countries. Several trade ministers, including under UPA I and II, have since led India's negotiators at the WTO but none of them have tinkered with the basic premise of Jaitley's stand. Meanwhile, he was appointed General Secretary of the BJP in 2002 and again in 2004 and resigned from this position only in 2009 when he became Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, in keeping with his party's principle of “One Man One Post”. He proved his political acumen during the BJP's decade-long stint out of power at the federal level by planning and executing his party's political and election strategy in eight Assembly (state-level) elections. Of all the assignments he has handled for his party over the last four decades, his current one, as Minister of Finance, is arguably the most challenging. He inherited an economy gasping for breath, both fiscal and current account deficits were way beyond prudent levels, the inflation rate was in double figures and the country's growth rate had fallen to low single digits. India's position as a member of the dynamic BRICS grouping was being questioned by many analysts, who said the country's macro-economic situation warranted, instead, a place among the so-called Fragile Five economies that everyone expected to go bust anytime. Jaitley, a vocal critic of “tax terrorism” and “policy paralysis” under the previous UPA government, has had his work cut out not only to revive India's economy but also guide it to the top of the global pecking order of world's fastest growing major economies. Massive investments in infrastructure, removing and easing the roadblocks that hinder foreign investments and ushering in a non-adversarial tax regime are some of the tools he has utilised while nursing the economy back to shape. The project is still a work in progress, but it will suffice to say that the economy is back on track and India is back in business.