A writer, journalist, politician and union minister, Arun Shourie has worn several hats — and never been far from controversy.
Shourie was born on November 2, 1941, in Jalandhar, Punjab, to H. D. Shourie and Dayawanti Devasher, and educated in elite institutions of Delhi — Modern School and St. Stephen’s College. He then studied economics at Syracuse University in the United States, and followed this with stints at the World Bank and the Planning Commission. In 1979, he joined the Indian Express as executive editor. Over the next four years, thanks to his dogged pursuit of stories as editor, he came to be known as a ‘crusading journalist’. In this he had the backing of the Indian Express boss, Ramnath Goenka.
Some of the major stories pursued by Shourie and his team of reporters in that phase include the Bhagalpur blinding incidents, the rights of undertrials, and cement and oil scams. Together, these put the Congress government on the back foot, and Shourie and Indian Express began to epitomize a special brand of hard-hitting, fearless journalism, the likes of which the country had not seen before.
Shourie’s methods were often unconventional. In 1981, for instance, he encouraged a reporter to ‘buy’ a girl called Kamala. He wrote to two Supreme Court judges and other important persons that the Indian Express was effectively breaking the law to prove that the law was being broken every day in the country — by the illegal trafficking of women and children.
Then, in 1982, Goenka, allegedly under government pressure, suddenly sacked Shourie.
Shourie continued writing for several media outlets and was also general secretary of the the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. In 1986, The Times of India hired him as executive editor, but the next year Goenka brought him back to the Indian Express. This time around, campaigns like the Bofors corruption scandal made it to the front page of the Indian Express regularly.
By 1990, Shourie was again out of the Indian Express. He continued writing regularly for newspapers and magazines. It was also clear by now to anyone who read him that his political sympathies were with the BJP, a party he would later join, and he espoused a stronger internal security policy in the wake of the unrest in Kashmir and Punjab.
“What is the poor Muslim weaver, his trade being swamped as that of any other weaver by the rush of technology, or the poor Muslim boy toiling away over a carpet like any other poor boy, going to get from the conferment of constitutional status on the Minorities Commission?” he wrote on October 25, 1990 in The Indian Express. “It is that many of these sops will worsen the lot of the Muslims: Just set up separate financial institutions for them and see the attitudes of managers in ordinary banks towards Muslim clients.”
In a piece on the Hazratbal mosque crisis in Kashmir, in The Observer, on October 27, 1993, he alleged that the siege of the mosque by the militants was a “spectator sport” for many newspapers. “One paper finds the siege of the terrorists symbolic of the siege of the people of Kashmir,” he wrote. “Another focuses on cruelties of our forces — not a word about what the jawans have to go through.”
Shourie later became a member of the BJP, and then minister of Disinvestment, Communication and Information Technology in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
Delivering the Cariappa Memorial Lecture in 2002 as a union minister, he said: “Today economic levers are routinely used to achieve political and diplomatic ends. To safeguard our freedom of action, our sovereignty, the first requisite is that we do not have to succumb to economic pressures. [W]hen we do anything that slows economic progress, when we block the reforms that are necessary for that growth, we weaken the country.”
Besides his career as a journalist and politician, Shourie has written and co-written more than 25 books, many of them generating controversy. His book on B. R. Ambedkar, Worshiping False Gods, was slammed by the likes of historian Ramachandra Guha, who wrote that Shourie’s “attacks on Dalits and their hero” come after books attacking “Communists, Christians and Muslims”. Guha added, “The only category of Indians he [Shourie] has not attacked—and going by his present political persuasion, will not attack—are high-caste Hindus.”
Shourie turned to matters more personal in Does He Know a Mother’s Heart?, a book on questions of suffering that came up while taking care of his son, Aditya, who is afflicted by cerebral palsy, and wife, Anita, who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Who is the real Arun Shourie? Legendary journalist, right-wing ideologue, or the Ambedkar-baiter? Perhaps, all this and more.
In an incisive article on him in 2009 in the Tehelka magazine, the journalist Shoma Chaudhury wondered if the key to Shourie’s “complex” character lay in his 'Arya Samaji background': “What complicates simple denunciations of Arun Shourie [. . .] is that, unlike many contemporary writers and intellectuals, he has dared to leave the ivory tower and take on the big questions of our time, bare-knuckled,” she wrote. “He has put himself in the firing line . . . What also complicates the denunciations is [. . .] his massive body of work as a writer.”
Also on this day:
1877 — Aga Khan III, first president of the All-India Muslim League, was born
1965 — Shahrukh Khan, Bollywood superstar, was born
2012 — Kinjarapu Yerran Naidu, Andhra Pradesh politician, died
