When I was young, Arun Shourie was regarded as a hit-man for Ramnath Goenka, owner of the Express. Prem Shankar Jha was his, more sober, more straightforwardly Socialist, counterpart at the ToI and, later on, the Hindustan Times. Both were the sons of ICS officers as was Brajesh Mishra who was close to Shourie more especially when they both served Vajpayee as PM. Jha, who studied at Oxford, was cultured and wrote quite well. Shourie did not- but maybe that was the fashionable new American style. He zig-zagged politically but there was always something of the crack-pot about him. He had done a PhD in Econ from Syracuse but may have come to think of himself as a combination of Woodward & Bernstein. Some senior journalists thought he had a nose for detail and might mature. But the crackpot could never see the forest for the trees.
Mihir Dalal, of whom I have written before, has an article on Shourie's long career. Dalal knows his stuff but his views are bizarre.
Perhaps no other journalist or thinker has impressed his passions, furies and perfidies as thoroughly upon India’s public sphere as Arun Shourie.
He became a Minister under Vajpayee. Was this because of Brajesh? But he was clearly a crackpot. Charitable people said it was because his son had cerebral palsy. Less charitable pointed out that he was Punjabi. Dalal takes the charitable view.
Yet his influence on post-Emergency politics is poorly understood.
Goenka had been with the Jan Sangh at the end of the Seventies. No doubt, he was using his attack dog in some manner profitable to himself. People used to say 'Shourie is a World Bank man' as though that was a recommendation. But Jha was a World Bank man too. Were they good journalists? Good enough. The Eighties were a period when press exposes did have material political effects but that was because the Dynasty was dying nasty and Cabinets had turned into a game of musical chairs.
Arun Shourie’s services as prophet of Modi’s India
Vajpayee's, maybe. Modi would have nothing to do with that crackpot.
The most influential Indian journalist of his era, Arun Shourie traded repute as a leftist dissident
Sarkari dissident
to shape the intellectual scaffolding of the Hindu Right
it had none- other than Hindutva which Shourie isn't into.
– and took much of the country’s elite with him
He was a crackpot. Elites are interested in staying elite. That means making the right investments- i.e. backing winners.
THE EMERGENCY of 1975 was the point of no return for Indian democracy.
It returned within a couple of years. Britain and Canada too had States of Emergency during the Seventies.
The story of the next five decades is, essentially, a story of the decline of liberal politics.
There was no liberal politics before or after.
India’s elite and middle classes abandoned the vision of the country’s founding fathers.
It became less of a starving shithole. It may be that the elites & the more affluent of the middle class no longer want government jobs for their progeny, but almost everybody else does.
The Emergency freed them up to disparage the pursuit of egalitarianism and sneer at the idea of shielding Muslims from the worst impulses of Hindu majoritarianism.
e.g. killing guys who keep trying to kill you. Dalal may not know what happened under Nehru in 1947/48. He probably thought 22 percent of Delhi's population decided to go for a picnic to Pakistan and liked to so much they refused to return even though Sardar Patel promised to personally cook beef biryani for them.
But Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian interlude also jolted the oppressed masses into defiance and political autonomy.
They turfed her out but voted her back in after three years.
They gradually withdrew from the Congress party’s paternalistic hand
There were two hands. It had split in 1969. There were more splits but the main Congress remains the ancestral property of the Dynasty.
and began to assert themselves in ways that shocked their former masters.
e.g. shooting Indira? She should have seen it coming.
For better and for worse, the nature of Indian democracy changed:
because such is the nature of all things
the body politic, scarred and energised in equal measure, searched for new forms of life.
e.g. making butt babies?
What began with
the Hindu majoritarian regime of the Brahmin
Indira has culminated in the Hindu majoritarian regime of
the backward caste
Narendra Modi. Years after she resigned as the British prime minister, the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher said she considered her greatest achievement to be Tony Blair, who transformed the left-wing Labour Party into a neoliberal force. With only some exaggeration, it could be said that Indira’s is Modi –
No. Priyanka says she wanted Rahul to inherit the throne. Mrs. Thatcher could not pass on Number 10 to Mark.
the Congress’s nemesis, yet one who inherited her politics of authoritarian nationalism and forged it into a brutal instrument of Hindu supremacy.
Keep saying that if you want Modi to keep winning. Hindus are the majority and they do want to be supreme in their own country.
Trained as an economist, Shourie emerged as an important public intellectual
Fuck off! If you are trained as an economist, you can only be a 'public intellectual' if other economists say you are hella smart. Amartya Sen was a public intellectual. Shourie was a guttersnipe.
during the Emergency and turned into an implacable enemy of Indira Gandhi – and, later, of Rajiv Gandhi, her son and political successor.
Nobody cared. If you are a politician, your enemy is the guy who might get more votes than you next time round.
With the exceptional courage that would become one of his hallmarks, Shourie, risking imprisonment,
If he wasn't imprisoned, there was no fucking risk. The boy was clearly cracked in the head. Blame Goenka. Why haven't you arrested him under FERA?
accused Indira of being a fascist
Nowt wrong in that. Gandhi, Tagore, Iqbal, Bose all praised Mussolini.
and relentlessly mocked her enablers in the upper and middle classes.
It was easy to mock Shourie. Good economists could make a lot of money. Look at Soros.
In polemical essays, he called for the redistribution of wealth
starting with himself?
and for the masses to assume control of state institutions.
like nuclear reactors?
As the executive editor of the Indian Express in the late 1970s, his “insurgency journalism” restored respectability to the press after its disgraceful abdication of duty during the Emergency.
No. People continued to tune in to Mark Tully on the BBC. Indian journalism was shit. Still, there were some juicy stories getting leaked from every direction.
At the same time, his work as an activist helped open up new possibilities for civil society.
Lots of ex-Civil Servants were setting up NGOs.
It is thus a minor irony that the inchoate, reactionary politics Indira improvised through the Emergency was hijacked and systematically constructed into an intellectual agenda for the Hindu Right by Shourie, her hated opponent.
The Hindu Right sought to consolidate the Hindu vote across caste lines. This could be done in two ways- by pointing to 'Minority appeasement' or 'aggression' or by constructive projects e.g. Ram Temple, celebrating festivals, etc. Indira, in her later years, was personally more religious than Atal or Advani but her dominance was purely the result of the disunity of the Opposition.
Initially inspired by leftist icons like Marx and Gramsci,
I suppose they were popular on American campuses of the period- at least with darkies and other social rejects.
he drifted towards the other end of the political spectrum after his first stint at the Express. Over the next three decades – in two dozen books, countless newspaper articles and any number of public lectures – he envisioned and detailed many of the themes that define India as we know it today: the unlikely union of capitalism and Hindutva,
An unlikely union would be between Capitalists and Communist parties. Religion based parties are natural allies for Capitalism.
the spectre of leftist treachery, the rationalisation of dominant-caste superiority on the basis of “merit”,
i.e. getting higher marks in competitive exams. But it is 'Forward' castes not 'dominant' castes who talk of merit. Agricultural caste want a job quota on the basis of their percentage of the population
the presumed regressiveness of Islam in contrast to the putative greatness of the Hindu tradition, a paranoid fear of real and imaginary threats to the Indian state.
We get it. Dalal hates Hinduism.
The historian Ramachandra Guha once called Arundhati Roy “the Arun Shourie of the Left”,
because he has shit for brains. Prem Shankar Jha was the Shourie of the Left.
charging that the free-spoken writer “falsified, exaggerated, used hyperboles, suppressed fact, overwrote – all that Shourie did from the other side.”
Guha does the same thing. He is the Huccha Venkat of Indian historiography.
In his latest avatar, Shourie has seamlessly turned away from the Hindu Right and become one of Modi’s most scathing critics.
Nobody noticed. Nor did they notice Jha.
He has variously described the prime minister’s rule over the last 12 years as “true fascism”, a “pyramidal mafia state”, the equivalent of “Congress plus cow” – that is, an amalgam of Hindu fanaticism and the corrupt ineptness of past Congress rule. Once he told an interviewer with fury that Twitter handles followed by Modi had “hurled abuse at me and my handicapped son.”
That was foolish. They will think they won.
When Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power in 2014, Shourie was in contention to become the finance minister, reprising his presence in the cabinet under the earlier BJP-led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee.
He and Brajesh were in the doghouse. Some older RSS people still rated Subramaniyam Swamy- who had better academic credentials.
But Modi excluded Shourie, a decision lamented by numerous political commentators.
Fuck off! Shourie was shite.
The omission of the right’s “only credible” intellectual, according to Guha, told “us all we need to know about” Modi.
Guha is not a political commentator. He is a stupid historian.
Guha wasn’t just implying that Modi was anti-intellectual, but also that Shourie might have had a moderating influence on the prime minister.
Fuck would he know?
Shourie’s time as a BJP member, which began in the late 1990s, ended unceremoniously in 2015. Last year, Shourie sustained his criticism of the Hindu Right with a long, critical book on V D Savarkar, a founding father of Hindutva.
The poor man is senile. Leave him alone.
Dalal gives an account of Shourie's career,
Shourie began writing research articles and essays, initially on economic issues and later also on politics. In a long 1972 essay titled “Conservative Influence of Liberalism”, he presented a long list of complaints against Nehru, one of his heroes. Not discounting Nehru’s monumental achievements, Shourie believed he had constructed a bland liberal system in which entrenched power and privilege were untouched.
This cretin hadn't twigged that Nehru had created a dynastic party. Unless there was one and only one biological heir, the party would split and keep splitting.
From a “Marxian standpoint”, it was evident that the Congress was financed by the urban rich and that its rural organisation was controlled by landlords.
No. It was obvious that it had been funded by 'license-permit Raj' Corporations and 'quotas' for contractors, etc. . This was banned in 1969 who thought the Syndicate would get the cash. But, it was the same system save with black money. But there was money for other parties as well.
The “mental makeup” of the Nehruvian elite – their psychology, ideas and culture – also betrayed the hollowness of their socialist rhetoric.
There was no elite. There were some hirelings and some bureaucrats and some dynasts.
Shourie pointed out that since many members of the elite had read law and studied in England, they had absorbed the liberal values of British political culture and eschewed radicalism.
I suppose he thought Jyoti Basu a moderate.
Nehru had erred gravely in discarding the “Gandhian tradition” of mass politics in favour of a technocratic paternalism embodied by elite institutions like the Planning Commission.
Vinobha Bhave & JP were wandering around the countryside doing Bhoodan. That was a grave error on JPs part, which he had come to realize around this time.
The Indian independence movement’s vision of swaraj – which for Mohandas Gandhi meant not just an end to colonial rule but also wholesale democratic transformation – had no place here.
Actually, there was democratic transformation. People like Kamraj Nadar became Chief Ministers.
Shourie contrasted Nehru’s mild approach with that of his Chinese peer, Mao – and also with the populism of Nehru’s own daughter, Indira. He commended her for aggressively pursuing land reform, failure to do which had been one of her father’s most damaging failures.
Shourie didn't know Land Reform was a State Subject.
With her undisputed stature, Indira, like Nehru in the 1950s, “had a unique opportunity to be an agent of change.” Shourie mused, “Will she fail us?”
Okay. I get it now. Goenka thought this guy was a joker.
Soon, the answer was clear: likely yes. In essays published shortly thereafter, Shourie offered a withering critique of Indira’s leadership.
No. He revealed his low IQ.
He observed that poverty couldn’t be reduced “without hurting the rich”, but the rich knew “that those who mouth socialist slogans in public eat out of their hands after office hours.”
Indira Gandhi would say this about JP. The pro-Moscow Communist Party were against JP, accusing him of being 'Communal' (he was trying to topple the only Muslim to have become CM of Bihar, but their support for the Emergency proved disastrous for their political future.
Shourie was able to get a Government job in 1976 which permitted him to return to India with his family.
By now Shourie was writing incendiary commentary. A long essay titled “Symptoms of Fascism” was due to appear in Seminar, but with press freedom in suspension, the magazine paused publication altogether rather than submit to the censors. Still, this piece, and his other articles on Indira’s malevolence, were passed around among politicians and activists jailed under emergency powers. His work drew the attention of the newspaper baron Ramnath Goenka, whose flagship publication, the Indian Express, was one of the very few mainstream outlets still daring to dissent.
He later explained to a journalist that he had some incriminating letters between Indira and her husband. He was probably lying. An Indian Press baron has a low opinion of the intelligence, or gullibility, of Indian journalists.
In 1978, after the Janata Party had thumped Indira’s Congress at the polls, a compilation of Shourie’s essays was published as Symptoms of Fascism. Notwithstanding its shrill tone, some of the analysis in the volume was irrefutable, and some stunningly prescient.
It was shit. Fascism only exists if there is a Commie threat.
Developing the arguments of the economist K N Raj, Shourie noted that the intermediate or middle class – lawyers, writers and bureaucrats, embodied by leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B R Ambedkar – had taken over the state after Independence.
No. Indian politicians took power at the Centre as they had in the Provinces. Previously, some British politician was top dog.
To realise the utopian promises of the freedom struggle,
The Brits fucked off. India was free. It's performance was a little better than it had previously been. Broadly speaking, it went in the direction the majority of its people wanted it to go in. With hindsight, one might say different decisions should have been made. But, a young Nation is entitled to make its own decisions. Who could say with certainty that schemes which drew wide support were misconceived?
they dramatically expanded the state and turned it into the primary agent of modernisation. But while the middle class increased its own power, it failed to rein in the industrialists and rural landowners – the biggest obstacles to its “socialistic” aspirations.
No. Industrialists lost power. The big estates were broken up. In some places Communists came to power. In others, regional parties did. Power shifted from educationally forward castes to 'backward castes' & Dalits. Modi is our first OBC PM. He makes the phoren educated sons of IAS officers look like a fucking Punch & Judy show.
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