While rummaging through some important opinion pieces published in the Indian press in the last 15 years, I revisited a piece written by one of the most eminent historians of contemporary India, in which he had remarked:

“It is tempting to see Arundhati Roy as the Arun Shourie of the left. The super-patriot and the anti-patriot use much the same methods. Both think exclusively in black and white. Both choose to use a 100 words when 10 will do. Both arrogate to themselves the right to hand out moral certificates. Those who criticise Shourie are characterised as anti-national, those who dare take on Roy are made out to be agents of the State. In either case, an excess of emotion and indignation drowns out the facts”.

(Ramachandra Guha in his piece The Arun Shourie of the Left, The Hindu, November 26, 2000)

For the different things which it can mean to different people, the metaphorical use of the proper noun “Arun Shourie” was the historian’s take on the ideological extremities of the times. But metaphors can change, while the left, right and centre can remain where they are. And the “metaphor of extremities” did change, almost a decade later. On October 25, 2010, Ramachandra Guha was delivering a lecture, occasioned by the launch of his work, The Makers of Modern India (Penguin, 2010), at India Habitat Centre in Delhi. Responding to a question on Arun Shourie (in context of the the current crop of public intellectuals in India), Guha opted for a decadal reversal of metaphors, as he described Arun Shourie as “The Arundhati Roy of the Right”. Period.

Mr Shourie’s relation with the Left and Right isn’t as mysterious as something written on the newsroom wall of the paper he famously edited in its heydays in the late Seventies and Eighties. And the current Editor-in Chief of The Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, doesn’t miss an opportunity to mention the “righteous” mystery of this pun: “Left says we (i.e. The Indian Express) are Right, the Right says we are Left. So we must be Right”. Arun Shourie may not fit in that newsroom. His shades of political opinion are more defined in his role beyond the blurred reams of journalistic fence-sitting.

It wouldn’t be a case of sticking your neck out if you say that Arun Shourie is a divisive figure (even a polarising one) for the political discourse in the country. But his presence in the public life of contemporary India can’t go unnoticed in any imaginable way. Transversing his roles in academics as a World Bank economist and a consultant to the Planning Commission, in journalism as one of the most iconic editors of post-independence India, in politics as one of most intellectually articulate faces of the Right, and in governance as a former Union Minster – he is a distinct entity in the public space. Even people who don’t agree with him on most issues concede that, as political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta says: “Shourie is an extraordinary public figure”. (http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-whose-name-do-we-suffer/818072/3)

But even outstanding public figures can stand out on the peripheries of public discourse which has its centre defined by the Left liberal consensus. Shourie is an unsettling figure for that consensus. So when he took a critical look at the Ambedkarite legacy in his book Worshipping False Gods, he had set himself up to be distanced from that centre. And when he attacked the monopoly and methods of the Marxist monopoly of the historical narratives found in textbooks, academic discourse and research institutions across the country, in his work Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, you had a forerunner of what was to come as “saffronisation of textbooks” during the BJP-led NDA regime (1998-2004). Correcting the alleged (or perceived) “wrongs” of Red historians has been a running theme in Mr Shourie’s intellectual engagement, as it has been in the works of other contemporary ideologues of the Right like Swapan Dasgupta, Chandan Mitra and Kanchan Gupta. And that’s the stuff that could drive you only to the fringes of the settled “sense of history” in the academic narrative of post-independent India. More dangerously, with convenient juggling of “facts”, the peripheries (towards Right or Left) sometimes reflect extremities of worldview, something Guha had cautioned against.

Interestingly, when you have a prolific commentator like Mr Shourie (who has already authored 26 books, along with writing numerous articles for various publications), the engagement with the world doesn’t stop at public issues and “national” history. Mr Shourie’s latest offering Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? (Harper Collins, 2011) is a personal account that seeks to address some fundamental philosophical questions that you always wanted to ask about suffering and its forms. The book glows. The agnostic in Shourie confronts an unquestioning religious society with riddles that glow with his insightful erudition, as well as his personal experiences as a participant in collective suffering as a father. As a reviewer of the work tersely put it: “What makes this book moving is Shourie’s personal account. Despite a sense of unavenged cosmic indignation, the book is suffused with extraordinary tenderness and love. Reading about Shourie’s family coming together to participate in Aditya’s life (Shourie’s son suffering from cerebral palsy); Aditya’s own struggle and receptivity; and the reservoirs of courage that are summoned in the face of great physical and emotional pain are a bracing experience… But there is still no resting place in the redemptive power of love. Aditya’s mother is afflicted with Parkinson’s. ..There is no answering a mother’s cry. But this book still has the extraordinary courage to make most of life”. Listening to Shourie about this work could also provide a few sobering moments of reflection.

The Shourie culture of credible exposé (remembered for AR Antulay’s resignation and sting operations in the early Eighties) faces a credibility crisis after the C-word fiasco in The Indian Express. The party he joined for being a “party with a difference” is today called “party with differences” and the “rightist” course correction he prescribed for India’s historical narratives has no serious takers in contemporary historiography. And to cap it all, Shourie sounds like a measured voice of dissent within a political party (there are people who are surprised he is still in the party). But for the landscape of political debates in the country, Arun Shourie remains a defining contour. The disturbing part is that it has done little to moderate his metaphorical elevation to a polarising figure of political discourse. It would be interesting to see how the coming years would cast the metaphorical uses of a name, “Arun Shourie”. Such are uses of the political vocabulary of our times.