The All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Saturday announced BJP veteran Arun Jaitley had died. Jaitley (66) was admitted to AIIMS on August 9 and had been on life support.
Jaitley, who was a nationally renowned lawyer, had been associated with the BJP since the party's birth. Jaitley started his political career with the ABVP at Delhi University, where he rose to be president of the students union in 1974. Jaitley was associated with the protests against the Emergency imposed by then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975-1977 and had been imprisoned.
Jaitley held a number of posts under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee governments (1998-2004), including portfolios of information and broadcasting, and law. While he never won a Lok Sabha election, Jaitley was an articulate advocate of the BJP's policies and ideology in Parliament and the media and commanded a influential position in the party and political discourse for three decades.
Jaitley endeared himself to Narendra Modi by passionately defending him during the Gujarat riots of 2002 when the latter was chief minister. Jaitley was given charge of the dual ministries of defence and finance when Modi formed his first government in 2014, highlighting his importance. While he relinquished the defence portfolio, Jaitley in his tenure as finance minister oversaw momentous decisions such as demonetisation in 2016 and implementation of GST in 2017.
Jaitley's health, which had been in decline due to diabetes, took a turn for the worse in 2018 and he underwent a kidney transplant in May that year. Piyush Goyal filled in for him as finance minister then.
Early this year, Jaitley left for the US to undergo treatment for soft tissue cancer, with Goyal again filling in for him as finance minister and presenting the Modi government's last budget. Though Jaitley's engagements were subsequently limited in public, he continued writing widely read blog posts over the past year to highlight the Modi government's achievements and berate the opposition on issues such as the economy, political stability and the Rafale deal.
In late May after the BJP won the Lok Sabha polls, Jaitley informed Modi that he did not want to be part of the new government given his poor health.
