The challenge to Jaitley is a challenge to business as usual in Lutyens' Delhi

Last week, on 23 December 2015, the Bharatiya Janata Party suspended Kirti Azad—the former cricketer and MP. Azad was suspended for defying the party’s orders and publicly raising the issue of corruption in the Delhi District Cricket Association (DDCA), particularly during the presidential tenure of Arun Jaitley—the finance and information and broadcasting minister of India—from 2000 to 2013. Late that evening, I got a call from Times Now asking me to appear for the channel’s 9 pm show—The Newshour. As is customary, I was asked about my views on the matter before my interview was recorded, and I expressed them. They were not very complimentary to Jaitley. Within minutes, I got a call, this time, to ask me if I could express myself on the matter with some caution. I answered that the only caution I would exercise was journalistic. I soon received another call from a person more senior in the organisational hierarchy, and we ran through the same conversation. To be fair to the channel, in all my years of appearing on various shows, this was the first time any representatives had suggested that I exercise restraint in expressing my views. A few minutes later, I got called once again claiming the OB (outside broadcasting) van that was headed to my flat was stuck in traffic. Coincidentally, the van never made it.

Somehow, where Jaitley is concerned, such coincidences are the norm across the media. This is a phenomenon Praveen Donthi, a staff writer with The Caravan, has described in some detail in his excellent May 2015 profile of the man. Having spent the first few years of my reporting life outside Delhi, I first encountered Jaitley in Bhopal in 2003 when he had come to take charge of the BJP Assembly campaign against Digvijaya Singh, then chief minister of the state. During that period, Jaitley would hold a daily mid-afternoon press conference to puncture some claim or the other of the Digvijaya administration. In the evening, he would hold court in the presence of a select few journalists from the state as well as several of those who had traveled from Delhi to report the elections.

Very early on I realised the pointlessness of such interactions. There was very little information on offer, much gossip and an attempt to foster an intimacy that seemed to favour only one side—Jaitley. I can still remember a story he related at one of the evenings I attended. Jaitley was explaining why he felt India Today, under its then editor Prabhu Chawla, was gunning for him. The story, that involved columnist Swapan Dasgupta and Chawla was scurrilous and unprintable. But I do recall being taken aback by the ease with which Jaitley could betray the confidences of even those such as Dasgupta—who continues to be considered close to him—to a complete stranger. Four years later, I met Jaitley again at the BJP office in Ahmedabad where I had gone to cover the 2007 Gujarat Assembly elections. As I spoke to Jaitley, Dasgupta sat at his feet taking dictation for a press release. By then I had spent a few years in Delhi, and nothing that Lutyens’ insiders put themselves through in their need to be close to power could surprise me.

This intimacy, fostered as it is by gossip, with a select number of journalists serves as a conduit for the numerous stories in the media that reflect Jaitley’s viewpoints. His network of journalists is formidable. His proximity to owners such as Shobana Bhartia of the Hindustan Times or the Jains of the Times of India completes a circle of influence in the media unmatched in Indian politics.

This circle of influence extends to industrialists, top lawyers, bankers, television anchors, editors and Delhi socialites. Isolated from the rest of the country, it has always had access to power under any government, so much so that getting work done at the very highest level is a matter of a phone call or two. It is a circle that has managed to convince itself that Jaitley is a misfit in his own party, a moderate among the hardliners of the Sangh. During the campaign in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, I had seen enough evidence of his belief in hardline Hindutva, but in the circle of privilege around Jaitley, this reality is subsumed in the false intimacy created by class, accent and access.

This circle has largely shielded Jaitley from criticism in the media. Till earlier this month, people of some eminence such as former cricketer Bishan Singh Bedi and Azad could not get their voice heard despite years of trying to disseminate information about the financial bungling in the DDCA during Jaitley’s tenure as president. Given how the media functions in Lutyens’ Delhi, stories that may reflect badly on Jaitley, even indirectly, rarely figure in print or on TV.

This has changed over the past month simply because Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and the man now leading the charge against Jaitley, doesn’t play by the rules as Lutyens’ Delhi understands them. This was partly why he was voted to power in a city resentful of the privileged. This was also why a large part of the country—which saw this privilege embodied in the Congress leadership—had voted for Modi. Modi has clearly failed to live by this mandate, but for the very reason that he has failed, Kejriwal cannot afford to.

Faced by a hostile lieutenant governor (LG) acting largely on behalf of the centre, Kejriwal reacted unexpectedly when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided various premises in Delhi citing a case that involved an officer Kejriwal had handpicked, his Principal Secretary Rajendra Kumar. From what has emerged so far, there is ample reason for this investigation. But this battle is not about principles, which are in short shrift on either side. It is about power and privilege. When Kejriwal called Modi a psychopath, the language was unexpected but reminiscent of the harshness with which Modi would take on the Gandhi family while ensconced in Gujarat. Again much like Modi’s reaction when accused of complicity in the 2002 communal violence, Kejriwal chose to attack rather than defend, and he chose the Modi administration’s weakest link—Jaitley.

The very strength that kept Jaitley safe from media scrutiny is what weakens him today. Several members from his party, well aware that he represents all that they were meant to displace, have been waiting for a chance to weaken Modi’s infatuation with him. These range from veterans such as LK Advani and much of the Sangh, to mavericks such as Ram Jethmalani and Subramanian Swamy. Jaitley has no shortage of enemies and they have seen an opportunity in the attack launched by Kejriwal. Today, he looks more beleaguered than it would have seemed possible even a few weeks ago. Those from the same circle of influence are doing all they can to save Jaitley, because in his absence they worry that Modi may actually be forced to deliver on acting against the privileges that define them.

The most recent attempt to strike down the inquiry on the affairs of the DDCA that was ordered by Kejriwal, comes from the LG, Najeeb Jung. Jung is the tailor-made mascot of Lutyens’ Delhi. He a product of St Columba’s School and St Stephen’s College, well-connected with the power elite and seemingly comfortable with whichever party is in power. As an officer from the Indian Administrative Service, he had a key role in the privatisation of the stated-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation’s Panna-Mukta oilfield in Maharashtra that, in 1994,  went to a consortium of which Reliance was a part. A few years after his retirement, again perhaps coincidentally, Jung went on to be employed by Reliance. In 2009, he was appointed by the Congress as the vice-chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia University and then as LG and the BJP has found no reason to remove him. He is a man who inhabits the same world as Jaitley.

In battles such as these, outsiders who don’t share such connections, are learning to be more crude and aggressive than Lutyens’ Delhi is used to, defying norms of expected behavior. The war now underway is a war between one of the most potent promises of the Modi campaign and the reality of his administration. The privileged entrenched in Delhi will not disappear easily, but after the attack on Jaitley they are just beginning to seem slightly less secure.