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.”