“Death of a Liberal”: Professor Joydeep Biswas writes after Arun Jaitley’s demise

I vaguely remember the Preface to ‘Patriots and Partisans’. This Allen Lane book from Ramchandra Guha appeared in 2012. Normally there is no rhyme or reason as to why on earth one should recall, after the elapse of good seven years, the introductory submission by the author of a book which otherwise contains some articles full of sweeping generalizations. The only plausible explanation for this selective remembrance is that Guha- for whom I have not been able to harbour any special respect just because of his sheer position of equidistance from Communism and Hindutva and between corruption and bigotry- presented there a brilliant case for what he fashioned as ‘polemical moderation’. The supine intellectuals of the country, he perhaps rued (I could not readily retrieve the copy of the book even after rummaging through shelves of my small library, for verification), failed to muster enough courage and character to posit as liberals.

Such and similar stray strands crisscrossed my thoughts as the nation came to know the inevitable-Arun Jaitley passed away past the mid-day today. He was the most happening finance minister after Manmohan Singh that the North Block has seen since early nineties. He was not an economist by any stretch of imagination. He had a stint of commerce education in the under-graduate level in one of the best colleges of Delhi. He then made a detour to law and went on to become a legal luminary of the county. It will not be a travesty to truth to say that he indeed brought a sense of commerce to economics when he played the stewardship of rolling out the GST regime with effect from 1 July 2017. The major two political configurations, viz, the BJP and the Congress saw eye to eye on GST, albeit theoretically. But the irony is that notwithstanding the political consensus the UPA could not bring everyone on board to implement this major and massive indirect tax reform in the annals of Indian economic history.

I freshly recount my conversation with Sumit Dutt Majumder, the former chairman of the Central Board of Excise and Customs and a globally acclaimed expert on indirect taxation, during the summer of 2017. He was lamenting the fact that the Congress had missed an opportunity to unleash the GST regime even as he sounded skeptical about the slapdash manner in which Modi-Jaitley duo was pushing it through. This became possible not for the masculine nationalism of neither Narendra Modi nor the Hindutva wave, but because of Arun Jaitley and his modus operandi. And here comes the role of Guha’s idea of polemical moderation I referred to at the start of this piece.

Arun Jaitley had been in the saffron world since his early college days. He was the president of DUSU on the ABVP nomination in the early seventies. He was incarcerated for long nineteen months during the Emergency era. On his release from the jail he joined the Jana Sangha. He has never negotiated with his political ideology which is right, extreme and intransigent. But in spite of that lifelong association with votaries of orthodoxy, he has been the most liberal face of the BJP. The country knows him not as someone who would gurgle communal expletives for winning an election. In fact, the only direct election he faced in his life (students’ body polls not being considered) was in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll in Amritsar which he lost. He was the most modern, suave, cerebral and accommodative face of the BJP in the one-and-a-half decade. He had the immaculate precision of forging camaraderie between the mutual exclusives like a Narendra Modi and a Shivraj Singh Chouhan, or say a Mamata Banerjee and GST.

Being the finance minister of the country he had to preside over a never-before-adventure, i.e., demonetisation, assuming but not admitting that he was privy to the step to be declared at 8 PM of November 8, 2016. He has presented five budgets in the Lok Sabha on the trot during the NAMO Govt 1.0. He was perfect in keeping the fiscal and revenue deficits in check. He had to own responsibility to the posterity for demonetisation and GST even as the positives flowing from the both are yet to surface. The business and economy have not really rallied around him. He may not have brought about the much-coveted oriental adage bahujanaya hitaya cha or the occidental maxim ‘the greatest good to the greatest number’. But he will surely be remembered as a politician who never bartered his liberalism for a berth in the school of majoritarian nationalism.

The author of this article, renowned columnist and commentator, Joydeep Biswas is the associate professor, Economics and HOD, Statistics, Cachar College.