A newsroom story

Arun Shourie's latest book chronicles his battles as a journalist, including an account of his dismissals. Three other books by former editors offer variations of the same

I will put a board outside your office: “The Commissioner for Lost Causes.”

This was Ramnath Goenka’s remark, writes economist, politician and journalist Arun Shourie at the very opening of his latest book (The Commissioner for Lost Causes), as the doyen of Indian journalism walked into Shourie’s “little cabin” at the Indian Express. Goenka, or RNG, “was — and looked — mighty pleased”, he writes.

Shourie and his colleagues had been documenting the condition of undertrials in a months-long series, the kind of work critics — including some seniors in the paper — didn’t think qualified as journalism, he writes. “This is pamphleteering. Our job is to give news, not run campaigns,” writes Shourie, describing the kind of criticism that came his way. But RNG, “a dogged litigant”, he adds, “was all for pursuing issues to the bitter end”.

And Shourie did precisely that, as his book chronicles: from exposing the Bhagalpur blindings, controverting judges, inviting contempt of court and revealing concealed reports to taking on chief ministers, being unsparing of a prime minister or a deputy prime minister, and much more.

He was also fired twice from the newspaper: first in November 1982 (he had joined as executive editor in 1979) and then in 1990, three years after taking over as full-fledged editor in 1987.

Shourie gives an account of that. But one man’s account of a story need not necessarily match another’s, as three books written by two former top editors of the newspaper reveal: Nihal Singh’s Ink in My Veins — A Life in Journalism and B G Verghese’s memoir, First Draft: Witness to the Making of Modern India, and his biography of RNG, Warrior of the Fourth Estate: Ramnath Goenka of the Express. Singh (Indian Express editor-in-chief from early 1981 to mid-1982) and Verghese (editor from June 1982 to 1986) have also written about the extent to which Shourie would go to get his reports published and of the “love-hate relationship” (First Draft) RNG and he had.

In Ink in My Veins, Singh writes, “Shourie believed that rules were made for others... On one occasion, I had to spike a piece he had written on Indira Gandhi, in language unbecoming of any civilised newspaper, just before it was to go to press. In an underhand move, he quietly sent it to the magazine section, printed in Bombay, without inviting a censure from Goenka.” Shourie spoke about this account at a recent Express Idea Exchange event, and how he sent the piece to M J Akbar who published it in the Sunday magazine when Singh decided not to do so on grounds of privacy.

The differences in the approach to journalism and what a newspaper should be —  a crusader or a non-partisan editorial product — also emerge starkly. “We could never agree on the paper’s outlook because, for him (Shourie), a newspaper was a stepping stone to politics and political office. For me the integrity of a newspaper was worth fighting for. Goenka swayed between these points of view. He used to tell me: ‘Not even five per cent readers look at the editorials’,” writes Singh.

Singh, put in his papers on March 17, 1982, realising that “Shourie with his direct and open channel to Goenka… was not prepared to put into practice any of my suggestions for improving the paper.” Goenka, he says, persuaded him to withdraw his resignation, “saying ‘I want to get rid of [expletive deleted] Arun’… I thought to myself that Goenka wanted to take aim at Shourie by placing a gun on my shoulder. My polite answer was that I was temperamentally unsuited for ‘Operation Arun’.”

Singh recommended Verghese (a former editor of the Hindustan Times), who ultimately succeeded him. In both his books, Verghese recalls that RNG introduced Shourie to him as a “race horse” that needed to be reined.

In Warrior of the Fourth Estate, Verghese writes that shortly afterwards, the axe did fall on Shourie after a story he wrote “based on records of proceedings of the Public Undertakings Committee (PUC) of Parliament on the import of 500,000 tonnes of high speed diesel at fixed prices from a Hong-Kong based Kuo Oil Co in 1980, at a time of volatility in oil prices in the wake of the global ‘oil shock’. A loss of Rs 9 crore had been incurred”. When Verghese enquired if the PUC had presented its report or was still in the process of completing its work, Shourie “was impatient with what he thought was mere sophistry” and “declined to have this checked by the news bureau chief, HK Dua, or anybody else, and preferred to withdraw the story”.

Some days later, he sent a missive to Verghese, with a copy to RNG, who was in Mumbai and en route to Ahmedabad, expressing “his unhappiness at the withholding of the story. He went on to suggest that RNG was tired and broken after his exertions during the Emergency and was trying to make up with Mrs Gandhi. Indeed, he needed to be saved from his own actions and it would be appropriate were Verghese and he jointly to take charge. He suggested that Verghese had been influenced to stop publication of the Kuo Oil story by RNG, which was simply not the case,” narrates the former editor in Warrior of the Fourth Estate.

Verghese, who died 2014 (Nihal Singh passed away in 2018), recalls in this book that RNG was furious and anguished “as he had treated Shourie ‘as a son'” and wanted him dismissed. Meanwhile, an “unrepentant” Shourie “sent copies of his unpublished series to some 50 Members of Parliament on Express stationary and leaked his version of the episode to the media”. The Goenka-Shourie correspondence also appeared in Surya, a journal started by Maneka Gandhi. Verghese writes that Shobha Kilachand (now Shobhaa Dé), then editor of Celebrity Magazine, published her conversation with RNG, without his permission, where he had said, “Arun is not a news-getter…” and that credit for his “scoops” and exposures belonged to others, in one case to RNG. Meanwhile, “Shourie summarised that the letter was leaked to the prime minister’s house, from where it was given to two magazines”, Verghese writes.

RNG sacked Shourie a few weeks later, writes Verghese, and put out this statement to the readers on November 21, 1982: “... There was and is no change in editorial policy. The only factor that counted was the need for compatibility between senior Editors and organisational norms and discipline. Mr Arun Shourie had been a tower of strength to me personally. But that does not answer everything... This paper is nobody’s personal property, but belongs to society at large... It will continue to perform its mission.”

In his book, Shourie writes, “I was not really surprised at Verghese blocking the Kuo Oil article…” and how it became publicly known in no time “that the article had been blocked”, that he had sent it to MPs and that RNG was livid “that the paper had been driven to a corner”. RNG, he writes, had signed a letter dismissing him from the paper but the day Verghese was to hand it to him, news came of Shourie being given the Magsaysay Award, which saved him from the phaansi (hanging). He writes there were also attempts to get him to resign — one of them through a letter from Saroj Goenka, wife of RNG’s late son, that read, “How can anyone who has written like this about ‘Father’ continue to stay in the paper?” But, he says, he was determined that only RNG fire him since it was he who had hired him. He writes that a senior government official told him that he would be dismissed “definitely before 9 November” because that was “the deadline that ‘your Goenka’ has been given. A case of his is coming up in the Court that day. If he has not removed you by then, government will go all out”.

RNG would bring Shourie back in 1987 as Express editor in what Nihal Singh describes as “the enigma of Ramnath Goenka”.

In First Draft, Verghese writes: “RNG wanted his ‘race horse’ back, but once again removed Shourie in October 1990, pleading that the ‘race horse is breaking my poor tonga’!”

This time the final straw was an episode involving VP Singh and an affidavit Shourie had “manufactured”, leading to a political storm. Shourie writes about his sacking towards the end of his book. He recounts he had returned home late when he got a call from a subeditor asking him to come back to the office. There was a message on the office teleprinter from RNG. He had been removed as editor.

Shourie also writes that when he rushed to Mumbai to meet RNG, he found him bedridden, “not even a shadow of himself”, his tongue “lolling about” and he “clearly did not have any knowledge of the message or its contents… Clearly, others were acquiring control… there was neither any way for me to continue in the paper nor any point in continuing in it.”

Verghese, in Warrior of the Fourth Estate, however, writes, “The dismissal order was sent from the penthouse at Express Towers to Delhi on an open teleprinter circuit, as Shourie had ignored an earlier letter sent the previous day after talking to RNG”. He goes on to add, “Though ill and bedridden for quite some time, RNG had been watching developments and been privy to the growing misgivings of his younger managers.”

Verghese also notes that “in a formal statement to PTI, RNG said that ‘in view of recent misunderstandings’ he had told Shourie that they had best part company amicably…” and that Shourie had “confirmed to PTI that the letter said that the step was taken in the interests of ‘morale and discipline’ in the paper and so that the Express’s image and ability to fight misrule were not impaired”.

Verghese further writes that Goenka “issued an office order that he alone would give editorial directions thereafter. RNG wanted a replacement with balance and maturity to restore the paper’s professional standing. He selected N S Jagannathan, editor of the Financial Express.”