New Delhi: Hardened by a term in prison as a student leader and polished over a career as a successful and urbane lawyer, Arun Jaitley, India’s new finance minister, could prove an effective foil for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The 61-year-old has also been given the important portfolio of defence, making him the most powerful member of Modi’s cabinet. Finance is arguably the most crucial portfolio in Modi’s new government as it seeks to drag India out of its economic torpor and create enough jobs for the one crore young people who join the workforce each year.
“We have to restore back the pace of growth, contain inflation and obviously concentrate on fiscal consolidation,” Mr Jaitley told repo-rters on Monday, signalling on his first day in the job a determination not to allow India to drift. On the election campaign trail, he said that it would be important to send an early signal that major infrastructure projects tied up in red tape would finally move ahead with “five big clearances, some big-ticket clearances”.
His polish, Western-style education and strong command of English makes him an effective foil to the rough-hewn Modi in articulating the government’s position to foreign investors, captains of industry and the RBI governor. A patrician figure who would not be out of place in London’s High Court, Mr Jaitley is the son of a successful lawyer. Born into a family that migrated to India from Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947, Mr Jaitley was educated in an elite New Delhi school and at the prestigious Delhi University, where he was a students union leader in the youth wing of the RSS.
Mr Jaitley has told Reuters he was formed politically by the experience of being jailed for 19 months in a crackdown by then-prime minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress. “It hardened my political convictions, it incr-eased my commitment, it made me rub shoulders with the top national leaders,” he said. As minister in charge of trade in the last NDA government, he led India in talks at the World Trade Organi-sation (WTO), blocking attempts by developed countries to gain greater access to emerging markets.
