Jaitley bows out

Arun Jaitley, finance minister in the outgoing Narendra Modi government and its most sophisticated voice, made it clear on Wednesday that he was withdrawing from government and party work due to serious illness. While the nature of his ailments is not public knowledge, in a letter to the PM — which he released in public — he made it clear he has been hampered by ill-health for the past year and a half, and would like time off.

Mr Jaitley's contribution to the Modi government and the BJP has been of a high order. As a young minister with Cabinet rank, he also served in the first NDA government of Atal Behari Vajpayee. Along with the PM and BJP president Amit Shah, Mr Jaitley constituted the troika credited with running the show since 2014. In the early phase of the first Modi government, Mr Jaitley was simultaneously entrusted with the key portfolios of finance, defence, and information and broadcasting. He enjoyed immense authority, though critics twitted him for not having won an election after life at university.

Mr Jaitley made his mark early as a corporate lawyer. His felicity with both English and Hindi, in addition to his ideological diligence in respect of RSS thought, can be said to be a factor that helped consolidate the market-oriented right-wing in the country behind the religious right.

Mr Jaitley remains a propagandist par excellence, as his blogs show. He will be missed by opponents too. His absence, along with that of the late Manohar Parrikar, will deprive the Modi government of modern intellectual inputs.