The family of former Finance minister Arun Jaitley, who passed away on Saturday, has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to cut short his ongoing three-nation tour in its wake.
We all have our personal favourites when it comes to our accessories. Arun Jaitley was no exception to this. Leader par excellence as he was, he occasionally indulged in some guilty pleasures like all of us do.
Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) and Bar Council of Delhi (BCD) also condoled Jaitley's demise and remembered his contribution to the legal fraternity. Jaitley practised as a senior advocate in courts, especially the Delhi High Court before he became a Union minister.
"Firstly, I am a Punjabi belonging to Amritsar, and secondly I want to serve my constituency by using my influence with the new government coming," Jaitley had said. His favourite local food was 'Amritsari kulchas', a local delicacy.
Arun Jaitley was the only minister who was alloted two heavyweight portfolios - defence and finance, in the first Modi cabinet.
Jaitley and Swaraj -- both lawyer-turned-politicians -- had a similar political trajectory -- they both rose under the tutelage of former prime minister, late Atal Bihari Vajpayi, and they both made the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, a force to reckon with. It can, thus, be but a mere coincidence that both the BJP stalwarts passed away within weeks.
Senior BJP leader L K Advani on Saturday fondly remembered Arun Jaitley as a man with a deeply analytical mind who the party depended on for finding solutions to complex issues. Jaitley, 66, died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) where he was undergoing treatment for a few weeks.
In the first term of the Narendra Modi government, Jaitley was in-charge of defence ministry from May 26 to November 9 of 2014, before Manohar Parrikar was brought in from Goa to helm it. Jaitley, the then finance minister, was again given charge of the defence ministry on Mar 14, 2017 after Parrikar quit the Union Cabinet to become Goa chief minister.
He was known as the well mannered, erudite politician who was well respected for his expertise on number of national issues. Arun Jaitley helmed ministries such as Finance, Information and Broadcasting to name a few. But he was not the one to mince words if anything came in the way of India's national interests.
Sibal said Jaitley was a man of exceptional qualities and abilities and was wedded to an ideology since his university days and was "fateful to that ideology till his last breath".
Last year after a prolonged stand-off between the finance ministry and the RBI which was then headed by Urjit Patel, Jaitley had brought in Shaktikanta Das as the RBI Governor after Patel resigned before his term.
The two leaders who have been active and made their marks in the pre-Modi era made a smooth transition after Narendra Modi won a landslide victory in 2014. Unlike many, they comfortably fitted in Modi's working style and were soon considered to be the two best ministers in the Prime Minister's cabinet. In that way, Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj shared a personal bond as well.
Jaitley was undoubtedly one of the BJP's most prominent leaders, besides being the Finance Minister during the first term of its government between 2014 and 2019. And he leaves behind a rich and chequered legacy, one where his tenure as the Finance Minister is marked with bold reforms, including some of the most far-reaching since Independence, as well as the notorious 'demonetisation' that dealt the hardest blow to the country's masses.
A brilliant orator and a dedicated activist, Jaitley held important positions like the country's finance minister, defence minister and leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha, Shah said.
Arun Jaitley's last tweet came on August 7 when he paid his tributes for Tulsidas Jayanti before tweeting how heartbroken he was at the demise of his cabinet colleague Sushma Swaraj, who passed away at the AIIMS following a cardiac arrest on August 6.
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