Shourie: Democrat or Chameleon?

Arun Shourie’s current positions on issues do not square up with those in the past

The launch of veteran journalist Arun Shourie's memoir, The Commissioner For Lost Causes, last week became the occasion for Karan Thapar, Barkha Dutt and Sreenivasan Jain to interview him. The three are eminent TV journalists, widely admired for their skills. It is, therefore, surprising that none of them asked Shourie to explain his transformation from being an ardent Hindutva apologist to becoming, arguably, the most belligerent critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a penchant for sarcasm that often has the nation chortling.

In 2015, Shourie described the BJP as Congress plus cow. A year later, he said Modi's demonetisation policy was as radical a measure as suicide is. In January 2017, to The Wire, he characterised the Indian state under Modi as a "pyramidal decentralised mafia state" and described his "Gujarat model" as "one man, nobody else."

Shourie said Indira Gandhi invoked the law to impose the Emergency on the country. But "these people [cow protectionists] are acting outside the law. This is true fascism because you say what is the law? I am the law," Shourie went on and on. He said Modi's BJP had made Muslims feel that India did not belong to them.

In December 2019, Modi visited Shourie at a Pune clinic, where he had been admitted with a head injury. They were photographed laughing together. Modi's visit was likely designed to mollify Shourie, whose snarky remarks against the government did not cease.

In September 2020, a Central Bureau of Investigation court in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, registered a criminal case against Shourie. This was regarding the sale of a luxury hotel in Udaipur in 2002, when Shourie was the Union Disinvestment Minister. An arrest warrant issued against him was subsequently stayed by the Rajasthan High Court.

Shourie was not cowed down. His courage is exemplary.

But there is also Shourie's past to reckon with. In 2009, reflecting on the 2002 Gujarat riots, Shourie confessed to Shekhar Gupta in the popular Walk the Talk show: "I was not all the time for this, that Modi [as Gujarat chief minister] has to go because of the killings, because in my view such things happen as a reaction, as happened in Delhi, as a reaction to [Indira] Gandhi's brutal killing [in 1984]. You can't prevent those things." To journalist Shoma Chaudhury, Shourie shockingly said, "I don't care if hundreds of people die somewhere. They die in earthquakes as well."

Shourie's current positions on issues do not square up with those he took in the past. He told Barkha Dutt last week that Modi's idea of simultaneous polls is the first step towards bringing in a Presidential system, which, he said disapprovingly, has always been the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's agenda.

Yet, during the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, he told ET TV channel that India was "transiting to a presidential system and the parliamentary skin is being shed." But do not be anxious, Shourie comforted, for a strong prime minister would run the government not with ministers but through 30 secretaries chosen by him.

Shourie thought Modi was just the man to usher in the transition. "He is regarded in Gujarat as civil servants' chief minister. He cuts out all riff-raff [ministers]," Shourie said. In Gupta's 2009 Walk the Talk show, Shourie described the RSS thus: "Everybody keeps saying ‘Fascist, Fascist', I think they are too democratic…" Ahem!

Shourie's role in the rise of Hindutva is as enormous as his contribution to journalism. Columnist Mukul Kesavan noted in 2017: "In the course of a lifetime of polemic, Shourie has written book-length screeds against everything that Hindutvavadis hate: communists, Ambedkar, Christian missionaries, secular historians and Islam."

Some evidence: Shourie co-authored with four others Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them. The book listed mosques standing atop 2,000 temples ostensibly destroyed by Muslim rulers. Journalist Rama Lakshmi went to some of these sites and wrote that people there had no memory of their destruction. Manufacturing memory, eh?

As recently as June 2014, Shourie tore into the late historian DN Jha's 2006 lecture on the conflict between Brahmins and Buddhists at Nalanda, Bihar. Shourie cited Tabaqat-i-Nasiri to claim that Bakhtiyar Khalji, a general of Muhammad Ghori, destroyed the Nalanda university complex, not Brahmins. Jha pointed out that Tabaqat refers to a university in Biharsharif, also in Bihar, which Khalji wrecked.

Jha concluded, "He [Shourie] appears and reappears in the historian's avatar when the BJP comes to power, tries to please his masters and keeps waiting for crumbs to fall from the table. His view of the past is not different from that of the…Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh…" Indeed, Shourie can learn about Buddhist-Brahminical rivalry from Giovanni Verardi's Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India.

Ignore those who say Shourie's metamorphosis came about because he was denied the post of finance minister by Modi. Indeed, there's the possibility that Shourie's views changed with time. But he needs to explain his past, his ideological transformation. In 2007, Thapar relentlessly quizzed Modi on the Gujarat riots, prompting him to walk out of the TV show. Likewise, he, Dutt and Jain needed to ask Shourie: Is he a democrat or chameleon, merely and merrily changing colours?

The writer is a senior journalist

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