At the lecture though, Shourie sloughed off all those years of platinum outrage with cynical ease. As Disinvestment Minister in the Vajpayee government, he had already sold controlling shares of the giant government-controlled petrochemical company, IPCL to the Ambanis — creating a massive private monopoly. (Journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta argues that this itself was an intellectual dishonesty, coming from a man who had championed fair and free markets all his life.) Now at the lecture, taking refuge in economist Frederick Hayeks argument that when rules ossify and become outdated, society starts violating those rules until conditions evolve where new rules come into play, Shourie claimed he had come to revise his view of the Ambanis. Most would say today that those restrictions and conditions should not have been there in the first place, he told the glittering audience, that they are what held the country back. And that the Dhirubhais are to be thanked, not once but twice over: they set up world-class companies and facilities in spite of those regulations, and thus laid the foundations for the growth all of us claim credit for today... NOT AN EYE FOR AN EYE. FOR AN EYE, BOTH EYES. NOT A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH. FOR A TOOTH, THE WHOLE JAW, SAYS SHOURIE Second, said he, by exceeding the limits in which those restrictions sought to impound them, they helped create the case for scrapping those regulations, they helped make the case for reforms. It is true everyone has the right to revise their views and Dhirubhais entrepreneurship dazzled even greater men, but challenge Shourie about the other and continuing Ambani corruptions he had documented at the Express, and he says, I was merely the editor, its Gurumurthy who wrote those stories. I did think they were brilliant and excavatory then. (In an uncharacteristic and revealing moment of self-irony though, he confesses his friend Gurumurthy had once challenged him: If Hayek is right, everyone can become a violator and say they are breaking laws for a better future. Who will judge which laws should be broken? Shourie says only half-laughingly, I told him, Ill be the judge of that.) Congress politician and Shouries college mate in St. Stephens, Mani Shankar Aiyar remembers a different Shourie. A hockey player, a teachers pet, an animated young man who fought fierce arguments in defence of Nehru and cooperatives. Where has that Arun Shourie of Rudra Court (a St. Stephens residence) gone? It is a great loss to our national life, says he, that instead of a great Nehruvian flowering, this intelligent man transmogrified into a fanatic Hindu right-winger. I think the leavening of a liberal education at Stephens was undermined by his four years at the fourth-rate Syracuse University during the worst years of the Cold War. This is what first moved him towards the Right, and from there to the usual positions of nationhood and Hindutva. Today, Shourie is just a 1920s Arya Samaji disguised as a BJP MP of the 21st century. Many before Shourie have made political and intellectual journeys a pendulum away from where they began. That, in itself, cannot be an indictment. Rather, what makes Shourie especially disturbing is the comets tail: the incandescent zeal and certitude he carries around like a transferrable ticket for whichever new station hes headed. As historian Ramachandra Guha puts it, Much of the time Shourie writes or acts as if there is a singular truth, with him as its only repository and guarantor. In another sticky instance of intellectual dishonesty, after the Mumbai 26/11 attack Shourie spoke with messianic passion in Parliament for a harder, more unforgiving State. Gone was the sensitive constitutionalist. Gone was the foundermember of Jayaprakash Nar ayans human rights group, the PUCL. Gone was the man who had crusaded for victims of false encounters and the blinded undertrials of Bhagalpur. (He had written then, If the criminal justice system breaks down, your eyes and mine are not safe.) Shourie had already, long years earlier, moved away from his commitment to human rights to an endorsement of TADA, POTA and the use of unquestioned State force to quell internal insurgencies: the KPS Gill position. Now, in Parliament, he argued with even greater fervour for dismantling the human rights movement and unnecessary legalism around terror suspects (never mind if innocents suffered in the process). As for Pakistan, nobody, he said, had ever won a war with minimal force. Indias response to Pakistan should be, Not an eye for an eye. For an eye, both eyes. Not a tooth for a tooth. For a tooth, the whole jaw. And for good measure, stoke some trouble in Balochistan. SHOURIES SON IS PARAPLEGIC. HE SAYS HIS BOOKS ON RELIGION WERE A SCREAM AGAINST RELIGIOUS EXPLANATIONS FOR SUFFERING Curiously, even as he has moved away with greater and greater scorn from liberal positions, Shourie has consistently sustained his fascination for liberal institutions: Democracy, Parliament, Judiciary, Constitution. Yet, propelled by a sense of his own infallible integrity, beneath this regard for the State and its institutions, a deeper more dangerous self-image seems to run through Shouries public conduct: the idea of Christ whipping the usurers; Mohammad urging righteous war; Krishna urging Arjuna into the fatricidal fields of Kurukshetra. The voice of Dharma. Justified violence. Coupled with a burning sense of samaj seva. * Reprisal The savagery of Gujarat 2002 left Shourie unmoved. He supported Modi WHEN YOU first meet Shourie, it is difficult to square with the discordant orchestral sound that surrounds his public life. He is mild and affable and surprisingly open to conversation. There is also a kind of silence in his spacious Westend home. There is the famous low, whispering voice, the bushy brows, the intelligent eyes, the sophisticated manner. But there is also a tight, fragile, held-in quality — a sense of him constantly steeling himself against the onslaught of life. Shouries wife Anita (a great love and another happy accident in his life) suffers from Parkinsons; their son Vikramaditya, now 37, was born prematurely, is severely paraplegic and has had multiple disabilities from birth. Shouries parents died within months of each other; his mother suffered immensely before she passed away. Shourie nursed them all, yet bears this unkind history with extraordinary compassion. Minutes into the conversation, his son is wheeled in. Shourie leaps up and kisses him with unaffected tenderness. This is our son Adit, he says with moving pride. Shourie has written several scathing books on religion, most notoriously on Islam and Christianity, but what is lesser known, also on Hindusim. He once told philosopher Martha Nussbaum that these books were a scream against the explanations given for suffering in the Hindu scriptures, Koran and Old and New Testaments. He says now, Our sons suffering was the newspeg for my pre-occupation with religion. But everything I found was soporific, so I finally gravitated towards Buddha who said there is no explanation for suffering, but as the nature of our response compounds our suffering, he could help deal with the response. Since then, Shourie has maintained a strict regimen of yoga and meditation, and in weaker moments, sessions with astrology. Friends say he never makes a show of his duty and is unfailingly solicitous of his wife and son. (It is difficult to fathom, but perhaps the vicissitudes of his private life have unconsciously played some part in his growing and callous impatience with public grief.) But Buddha is only one part of the complex cocktail of inspirations in Shouries life. There was his father HD Shourie, a magistrate in pre-partition Lahore, and later the editor of Common Cause, a pioneering consumer issues journal and litigant that fought many landmark cases for peoples rights, most famously, old peoples pension. There is Gandhi, Nehru and JP — none of whose vision Shourie now shares, but men he still considers giants because they had no price, were constantly dialogic and lived with immense personal integrity, an attribute he values highly in himself. At the other end of the spectrum — and part of the contradictions within him that he is blind to — there is Hindu thinker Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, men Shourie calls deep and courageous thinkers, who were highly critical of Islam and Christianity. PERHAPS THE KEY TO SHOURIES CHARACTER — BOTH HIS BIGOTRY AND PERSONAL INTEGRITY — LIES IN HIS ARYA SAMAJI IDENTITY Swarup, in fact, seems to have been a big catalyst. In 1984, when Shourie was deeply shaken by the anti-Sikh riots, Swarup told him, If the State neglects its primary duties and fails to act firmly, there is bound to be a reaction in society. The violence against the Sikhs was induced by the Congress; but because of their suppressed grievances, the Hindus appropriated that violence. Shourie says the Congress handling of Shah Bano and Bhindranwale set him on his journey towards rightwing political positions. But it is Swarup who seems to have set him on the hackneyed track of Hindutva justifications: the logic of grievance and victimhood as explanations for retaliatory violence. So, today, Shourie might condemn the vandalism at the Mangalore pub; but the murder of Swami Laxmanananda explains the arson in Kandhamal; and the burning of the Sabarmati, the pogrom in Gujarat. Why not insist doggedly that the State punish the guilty? Why condone collateral violence? That is how society reacts, he shrugs. (So what if his idol Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement because 22 policemen were killed in Chauri Chaura? Shourie has shifting definitions of personal integrity.) Ask him how he can be unmoved by what happened in Gujarat, and he answers, I am moved by what happens to individuals, what happens to my son. I dont care if hundreds of people die somewhere. They die in earthquakes as well. Shocked, I ask, Why react so strongly to terror attacks then? Because that is an assault on the State, he replies, without a moments hesitation. (Set aside obvious humanist values. One could argue that killing hundreds of innocent citizens — be they Muslim, Christian or Hindu — is an assault on the State too, when the State has promised the Right to Life to all citizens. But you sense that for Shourie, its a closed argument.) * To Ashes Christians outside their burnt down church in Orissas Kandhamal district Photo: SHAILENDRA PANDEY
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 23:21:52 +0000
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