The journalist-parliamentarian-author paints a rather bleak picture of India’s future even at a time when, in growth terms, it continues to do pretty well.
Arun Shourie is happy to meet, but not fussy about food. Any place for lunch is fine, he says. I suggest La Piazza at the Hyatt Regency since it is not far from where he lives, and he readily agrees. When he gets there and looks at the menu, he seems to pick almost the first thing that his eye spots. Eventually, he allows the waiter to suggest some options. He asks for a “thick soup” and seafood pasta (I settle for a minestrone and sea bass), asking only that they put as much chilli powder as they can. Blandness does not go with Arun Shourie(!), writes T N Ninan.
He has come with his two latest books, his 23rd and 24th, as presents. I have long admired the way that he has taken over his own publishing work—to speed up the computer-to-bookshop process (a few weeks), and to cut costs since he lives on his writing. He does not need a manuscript editor, the pages get set as soon as he has finished writing, he gets the printing done at a press of his choosing, and all he needs is a distributor. He does not spend money on launch parties, but makes sure the books are reviewed … and the sales happen. We do the maths and it turns out that he makes three times as much as he would if he had gone to a regular publisher. The Ambedkar book sold the best, he says (24,000 copies), and most manage to sell more than 3,000 copies.
I tell him that he and Ramchandra Guha are the only two people I know who live on the income that their writing brings them, and he says that he also does consultancy work along with a long-time friend. He tried to make money recently by investing most of his savings in the stock market, because everyone told him he was missing out … and he has ended up with big losses. He manages a laugh.
Over the years, our most interesting conversations have been over lunch. When he was a minister, he would call up two or three editors, and serve food brought from home along with a dosa or two ordered from the Yojana Bhavan canteen. And he would regale you with stories of Cabinet meetings, which businessman had said what to him, what had happened to a file … None of it was to be used, all the material would go into a book that he planned to write. So I ask him why he has not written about his ministerial experiences, and he pauses before saying: “It would hurt too many reputations.” I ask him if he left the government with less or more respect than he had for it when he joined as a minister, and he says: “Much less”. The person he keeps praising is Vajpayee.
Even now, as he talks about the BJP and individual leaders, he is careful to say this or that should not be used. So I try to move the conversation in other directions. How did he get married, for instance? He says his and wife Anita’s aunts knew each other, and they met “over the usual tea”. Anita told him later that she had decided that if the departing Shourie turned round to look at her before he got into his car, she would marry him. If he did not, it would end with the tea. “Fortunately for me,” says Shourie, “I looked back … and so here we are!”
A recurring theme with him is the decline in standards. One of his early books was called Symptoms of Fascism and I ask him if he sees the spread of fascist tendencies. The danger, he says, is not fascism but disarray, even disintegration. I ask about that last word. “If you were in the Soviet Union in 1985, would you have said that the whole place would implode in five years,” he asks as a counter. It is a bleak view as he recounts stories of corruption in state governments, and says, “Things are much worse than even 10 years ago. It is not corruption but cancer, and it is spreading.” He says the point about Gandhi’s and Nehru’s generation, and he mentions BK Nehru, is that “they were people without a price”.
His face lights up when I bring up Ram Nath Goenka. The stories tumble about … how Goenka was secretly meeting Srichand Hinduja even as Indian Express was running its Bofors campaign … telling Shourie how Nehru asked him to employ Feroze Gandhi, and how he later sacked him (the car was sent to his residence as usual in the morning, but the driver was told to drive away as Gandhi came out of his house, and to tell him that his instructions were that Gandhi was not to come to the office any more!). I ask him about his own dismissal as editor of the Express, on an open teleprinter line, and he says that was the handiwork of people acting in Goenka’s name. “I took a flight the next morning to go and see him in Mumbai, and it was clear that Goenka was no longer aware of what was going on.” But he adds: “Maybe he told me the Feroze Gandhi story to warn me that could be my own fate. He had a corkscrew mind.”
I feel compelled to raise the episode that I feel has blotted his reputation, allowing Reliance backdoor entry into telecom. He doesn’t agree that it has blotted his reputation, recalls what he had written years earlier in The Economic & Political Weekly on “letting the hounds run”, and says that what he wanted to do was get rid of court cases and effectively de-license the whole business by issuing universal licences. So will he be finance minister in an NDA government? He thinks not. “I won’t be considered reliable,” he says without elaboration.
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He gives me a booklet on the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering that has been set up at the IIT in Kanpur, with the money that he gets as an MP for “local area development”: Rs 2 crore a year, or Rs 12 crore during his six-year term in the Rajya Sabha. Of that, he has given Rs 11 crore for the Centre, which has set up a green “Building in the Garden”. Shourie leads me through the details with great care, and it is clear that he has brought his customary thoroughness to the task, to achieve 41 per cent reduction in energy consumption by using passive architectural measures, efficient lighting, and with an earth air tunnel for cooling … among many other features.
We are approaching the end of two hours, he has ordered a Sprite and a chocolate dessert (I steel myself and stick to fruit), and we return to his bleak view of the future. Isn’t there anything positive that he sees around him? “Yes, of course,” he says. “Economic growth, what Indian companies are now capable of … but growth is hiding the problem.”
