Revolutionary Journalist

The commissioner of lost causes Arun Shourie penguin random house Rs.619 Pages 582 An account of the author’s tumultuous years as Editor of the Indian Express under its legendary publisher Ramnath Goenka To citizens of a certain vintage who have outlived their prescribed lifespan of threescore and ten, and who remember the era before television and social media when the press was the sole purveyor of news and learned opinion, Arun Shourie, a former World Bank executive who was parachuted to the top as editor of the Indian Express in the post-Emergency era, is a legend. In short time he transformed newspaper journalism from a genteel profession in which grave, pipe-smoking editors with Oxbridge credentials dictated learned, balanced editorials which were accorded high respect, into an iconoclastic medium which went after government and politicians with ferocity and tenacity. This memoire is an autobiographical account of Shourie’s tumultuous years as Executive Editor of the Indian Express under its equally legendary publisher/proprietor Ramnath Goenka (1904-1999) who earned himself a place of honour in the Hall of Fame of Indian Journalism as the only newspaper proprietor who stood up to prime minister Indira Gandhi when she declared post-independence India’s sole and infamous internal Emergency (1975-1977). The volume starts with Shourie’s dissatisfaction with his prized job at the World Bank in Washington D.C. How he landed this coveted job, is not recounted. The author had just got married and Washington was a very “fine green place”. The job involved travelling to many countries. “But all our relatives were in India and all my interests were in and about India.” After intensive searching for opportunities, he landed a Homi Bhabha scholarship plus a consultancy at the Planning Commission, at Rs.500 per month. In the early 1970s, the Soviet-style Planning Commission was dominated by “Mrs. Gandhi’s circle of Kashmiris” in which “everyone of significance liked to think of himself as being to the Left of everyone else”. Soon enough Shourie was obliged to resign from the commission, and luckily got his job back at the World Bank thanks to his friendship with Pakistani economist Mahbub-ul-Haq. Back in Washington, it’s a measure of the man that instead of thanking his stars that he was safely abroad when Mrs. Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, Shourie was “even more determined to return to India,” and he gave notice to the Bank despite his son Adit being born with a brain injury. During his notice period, after much effort he landed a job as a senior fellow at the Indian Council for Social Research, and the Shouries moved into his father’s home in Delhi. After returning to Delhi in the midst of the Emergency, Shourie began writing opinion essays for Seminar, one of the few publications “continuing to write independent stuff”. An essay titled ‘Symptoms of Fascism’ prompted the voluntary closure of Seminar rather than the publishers — well-known intellectuals Romesh and Raj Thapar — submitting to pre-censorship as required by Emergency regulations. The essay was nevertheless cyclostyled and…