Arun Shourie

"The Dalai Lama is in India at India’s invitation. Panditji meets him on 26 and 28 November 1956. The Dalai Lama is distraught. Panditji jots down the points of their exchange. The Dalai Lama puts the figure of Chinese troops in Tibet at 120,000, the very figure for which Panditji had come down on Apa Pant. The foreign secretary inserts a paragraph in Panditji’s notings about the talks: ‘The Dalai Lama appealed to India for help. PM’s reply was that, apart from other considerations, India was not in a position to give any effective help to Tibet; nor were other countries in a position to do so. Dalai Lama should not resist land reforms.’ Instead of help, Panditji gives advice. He records the advice he gives: ‘D.L. should become the leader of the reform. Best way we can help is by maintaining friendly relations with China, otherwise China would fear our designs in Tibet.’ An excuse, and a presumptuous one—‘otherwise China would fear our designs in Tibet.’"

"As the principal object of this brief book is to set out the evolution of India’s China-policy in Panditji’s own words, and to show how those assumptions and habits continue to endanger us today, I have kept annotations to the minimum. But what Panditji did and said and wrote in regard to China does deserve to be analyzed almost at the psychological and linguistic level! For his stance, his formulations, his rationalizations are rooted in habits, in mental processes. Not just his assumptions and premises persist among policy-makers, those very habits and mental processes persist. In the 1950s, they went unquestioned because of the lofty position that Panditji occupied in our lives and discourse. Today, they go equally unquestioned—though for a different reason: discourse has got so dumbed-down that no assumption or premise is examined as it should be. An illustration will bring home the consequence. Among the habits that persist, one is especially harmful as it rationalizes going-along at an almost subliminal level. This is the habit of slipping in a thought or sentence which excuses one from facing the facts. We see this in Pandit Nehru’s writings and spoken word at every turn. ..."

"A contributing factor certainly must have been the contempt that Mao, Chou En-lai and others felt for India and Indians. This comes through again and again in conversation after conversation of the Chinese leaders. Chou and Kissinger agree on how India is the one that is causing the troubles in East Pakistan; on what China and US should together do to halt India in the tracks; they agree about not just what is ‘the Indian tradition’—deceit, blaming others—but just as much about the Indian character—marked by ingratitude.⁴ The contempt and coordination show through even more dramatically in the conversations that Kissinger later has with the permanent representative of China at the UN, Huang Hua, during which he asks Huang Hua to assure Chou En-lai that, should China take military action against India to divert it from pursuing its assault on Pakistan, the US will hold the Soviet Union at bay. Nixon, Pompidou and Kissinger are exchanging views about the state of the world. Nixon summarizes the Chinese assessments: ‘...the attitude of the Chinese towards their neighbours can be summed up in this way. The Russians they hate and fear now. The Japanese they fear later but do not hate. For the Indians they feel contempt but they are there and backed by the U.S.S.R.’"

"I don't see the difference between the two. I feel they (the BJP and the Congress) are one party. They are jointly ruling. It is a dinner party. They meet at dinners. They meet socially. They decide on what has to be done about issues. First, the media should write about itself. It is extremely short-sighted about the media to black out these things. The Mitrokhin Archives revealed how (the then Soviet intelligence agency) the KGB boasted that they were able to plant 400 stories in such and such Indian newspapers. The Indian media blacked it out. Then, privatetreaties of The Times of India that other people have now adopted has been completely blacked out.... When the Press Council of India was forced to appoint a committee to look into the allegations about 'paid news', the Press Council itself suppressed the report."

"The first derailment was caused by plucking the words ‘of their choice’ out of context, by tearing them away from the object for which Articles 29 and 30 gave minorities the right to set up and administer institutions. A normal engineering college or a college of dentistry can by no stretch be taken to be an institution that has been set up to help conserve the language, script or culture of the minority. Yet, provided the engineering or dentistry college has been set up by members of a minority, it was presumed to enjoy the protection of Articles 29 and 30, and thereby be beyond the reach of the state."

"The result has been as predictable as it is iniquitous and absurd: if Ram Sharan sets up an engineering college, the state as well as the university concerned can prescribe all sorts of things it must do; if Mohammed Aslam sets up an exact clone of that engineering college across the road, teaching exactly the same subjects, using exactly the same textbooks, neither the state nor the university can regulate its functioning!"

"On the other hand, when sticking to the text is what will advance the judgment, they become strict constructionists. Some of the most conspicuous instances of this can be found in judgments relating to Article 30, the article that deals with the ‘right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions’. The country had been partitioned on the cry that Muslims will never be secure in a united India. The framers were naturally keen to reassure the minorities that they would be free to preserve their religion, language and culture. Accordingly, Article 29 was enacted guaranteeing them and assuring them of this freedom. In case they wanted to set up institutions for safeguarding their language, culture, religion, Article 30 was enacted assuring them that ‘All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.’ The context made the purpose clear: minorities would have the freedom to set up such institutions as they thought would best preserve their culture, religion, language. But, given what has been the climate of discourse since the framing of the Constitution, the judges became literalists. Minorities would have the right to set up and manage ‘educational institutions of their choice’ irrespective of the purpose for which the institution was set up. Thus, engineering colleges and dental colleges set up by a family of, say, Muslims would have freedoms from state regulation and oversight that engineering and dental colleges set up by run-of-the-mill Indians would not."

"Now, these are not stray phrases thrown in to light up a purple passage. They are stances, they are standpoints that indicate the direction in which that judgment will go, they are signposts which tell us where the reasoning being advanced in the text will eventually end. Such formulations have a significance beyond the particular judgment in which they figure. Succeeding benches can strike the same pose and gallop further in the same direction."

"We comfort ourselves: at least, the virus of reservations has not got into judicial appointments; at least, reservations have not been extended to Muslims and Christians. Both notions are just make-believe."

"As for reservations not having been extended to members of religions that repudiate caste – Islam, Christianity, Sikhism – again, that is but make-believe. The chairman of the Minorities Commission, my friend Tarlochan Singh, sends me a list of fifty-eight castes and of fourteen tribal groups, Muslim members of which have been given reservations. Even those who convert to one of these religions, continue to remain entitled to reservation. The rule in Tamil Nadu is that if the name of the father falls in the lists of Backward Castes/Most Backward Castes/Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes, then, even if the person has converted to another religion, he remains entitled to reservations. In Gujarat, members of Backward Castes continue to avail of not just reservations but even of advantages under the roster system after conversion – 137 castes and sub-castes have been listed as socially and educationally backward in the state; of these, twenty-eight belong to the Muslim community. In Karnataka, ‘caste at birth’ is the norm. In UP, several Muslim castes are included in the reservation list – Lalbegi, Mazhabis, even Ansaris. The position is no different in Madhya Pradesh, in West Bengal. The Indian Express correspondent in Kolkata reports that the government of the ostentatiously secular CPI(M) strained to have reservations in government service as well as educational institutions extended to Muslims qua Muslims, and directed the state Minorities Commission to ascertain how such reservation had been decreed in Andhra Pradesh. The plan has had to be deferred for the time being, he writes, Only because the Andhra Pradesh High Court has struck down the Andhra order as unconstitutional."

"Even as moves are afoot to get the Andhra judgment reversed, the government has directed the armed forces to count soldiers and officers by their religion. Nor is this move an inadvertence. It has arisen as a result of a committee that the government has appointed under a former chief justice of Delhi, Rajinder Sachar -each member of which has been carefully selected for his ‘secular’ beliefs. Each term of reference on which it is to supply information and make recommendations, as we noted at the outset, has been just as carefully selected to justify reservations and other concessions to Muslims as a religious group."

"With elections looming, in January 2006, the Government of Kerala announced another ‘package’ of reservations for backward castes and for Muslims: service rules of the state shall be altered to permit direct recruitment of these sections so as to fill the 40 per cent quota that has been set aside for them; if suitable candidates are not available from these sections, the vacancies shall not be filled by merit; the state Public Service Commission shall prepare an ‘additional supplementary list’ so that the vacancies may be filled only by these sections; 20 per cent of the seats shall be reserved for these castes in graduate and postgraduate courses in government colleges; the chief minister will himself monitor the implementation of the reservation policy; there shall be a permanent commission to ensure that reservations are fully filled..."

"With elections upon them, the DMK and its allies announced in Tamil Nadu that, once in office, they will bring forth legislation to give reservations to Muslims and Christians."

"The Jharkhand government, in turn, has announced that members of thirty-two tribes that are the most backward – literacy level among nine of them is said to be just 10 per cent – shall be directly recruited into government service; those among them who pass the graduation examination shall not have to take the qualifying examination which all others who enter government service have to take."

"And beware, the progressive judges have already put out the basis for extending reservations to Muslims or Christians as Muslims and Christians. The word that the Constitution uses is ‘communities’, the word it uses is ‘classes’, Justices Jeevan Reddy, Sawant and Thommen hold in Indra Sawhney. ‘Community’ and ‘class’ are wider than ‘caste’, they say. So, entities wider than ‘caste’ can certainly be subsumed under them, they say – the only proviso being that the groups so identified be ‘backward’. Second, in spite of the teachings of Islam, Christianity and Sikhism, castes persist in these religions also, they explain in justification. As that is the reality, it would be invidious to restrict access to reservations to the backward sections of Hindus alone...3"

"How far we have descended! Today progressives dress up their casteism as secularism! The benefits of reservation shall be extended to Muslims and Christians also, they proudly announce. In Andhra the decision of the government has had to be twice struck down by the courts – the government had decreed reservations for Muslims qua Muslims. Even as moves are afoot to get that judgment reversed, the Central government directed the armed forces to count soldiers and officers by their religion. Nor was the move an inadvertence. It arose as a result of a committee that the government had appointed under a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. Each member of the committee has been carefully selected for his ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ beliefs. Each term of reference on which the committee has been asked to supply information and make recommendations has been just as carefully selected to justify reservations and other concessions to Muslims as a religious group:"

"Every single item betrays the singular purpose of the whole exercise–to provide the rationale for extending reservations to Muslims. Nor is that opportunism confined to the present ruling coalition. In the run-up to the 2005 elections in Bihar, rival groups were vying with each other promising reservations for Muslims qua Muslims."

"The object of the framers of the Constitution was, as ours must be, quite the opposite. It was to wipe out the cancer of caste even from Hindu society. Only with the greatest reluctance did they agree to allow reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribe – for they felt that doing even this much would perpetuate caste distinctions. The reservations were, therefore, to be exceptions to the general rule."

"One must reflect deeply on the nature of the adversity, and on how it may be converted into an instrument for growth. The routine Gandhiji set for himself was always so much stricter and so much more demanding than anything that a jailer would have thought of imposing on anyone. Similarly, picture Vinoba in solitary confinement in that cell, 8 feet by 9 feet in dimension: how he converts imprisonment into ashram life; how in that tiny space, in forced and complete isolation, he retains his mental discipline by meditating for two to three hours every day; how he disciplines himself physically by walking every day for eight hours inside that suffocating cell, and thereby covering ten miles—covering ten miles in a cell 8 feet by 9 feet every single day! In both cases, control remained in the hands of the prisoner, not the jailer—a very important factor in dealing with adversity."

"The rituals—for instance, those we go through during a marriage ceremony—were devised to imbed certain values into us: the experience of centuries had led thoughtful persons to see that going through those steps, that reciting those mantras and reflecting on them would help us internalize those values, and mould our lives accordingly. But what do we do today? First, we outsource the ritual—to a pandit, say. As he goes through the motions prescribed for solemnizing a marriage, as he chants those mantras, we don’t have a clue about the meaning of the words that he is reciting, nor of the steps—‘Now pour some water on the earth, and then on . . .’ Nor do we care: ‘Panditji, puja zaraa jaldi khatam kar deejiye. Guest dinner ke liye wait kar rahen hain’—‘Panditji, please conclude the puja a bit quickly. The guests are waiting for dinner.’"

"In the end, India had to wait till 1998 for Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians to be published. This book uncovered in detail after ghastly detail, this multi-layered assault on the national psyche that has disfigured the minds of at least three generations regarding the vital truths of their own nation. And thanks to this seminal contribution, “Eminent Historian” has fittingly become a swearword in the Indian public discourse."

"Anyone who thought India had dismantled its notorious system of bureaucratic controls when it embarked on economic reform in 1991 ought to consult Arun Shourie. As cabinet minister (at various times since 1998) for privatisation, administrative reform, information technology and telecommunications, Mr Shourie's observations are close to the bone. The Hindu nationalist-led government in which Mr Shourie was the most prominent economic reformer was thrown out last May. Franz Kafka would have had difficulty dreaming up some of the examples cited in Mr Shourie's book. ... But it is what India's bureaucracy is like under normal conditions that matters and Mr Shourie does a depressingly thorough job in chronicling it. One can only hope that India's senior civil servants find the time to read this book - and have the grace to wince."

"Muslim leaders and Stalinist historians were raising a howl about Hindu chauvinism when it came to the notice of Arun Shourie, the Chief Editor of the Indian Express at that time, that some significant passages had been omitted from the English translation of an Urdu book written long ago by the father of Ali Mian, the famous Muslim theologian from Lucknow. He wrote an article, Hideaway Communalism, in the Indian Express of February 5, 1989 pointing out how the passages regarding destruction of Hindu temples and building of mosques on their sites at Delhi, Jaunpur, Kanauj, Etawah, Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura had been dropped from the English translation published by Ali Mian himself. This was a new and dramatic departure from the norm observed so far by the prestigious press. Publishing anything which said that Islam was less than sublime had been taboo for a long time. I was pleasantly surprised, and named Arun Shourie as the Gorbachev of India. He had thrown open the windows and let in fresh breeze in a house full of the stinking garbage of stale slogans."

"[Arun Shourie's article 'Hideaway Communalism'] had violated a taboo placed by the mass media and the academia on any unfavourable narration of the history of Islam since the days when Mahatma Gandhi took command of the Indian National Congress and launched his first non-cooperation movement in support of the Turkish Khilafat."

"Arun Shourie had shown great courage. But he had counted without the secularist crowd which had access to the owner of the Indian Express. He told me on the phone that there was some trouble brewing. I have never talked to him about the nature of the trouble, and do not know if my articles had anything to do with his ouster from the Indian Express next year. All I know is that he had to slow down the publication of my next two articles."

"Mani Shankar Aiyar totally condemns one of Arun Shourie's books, and then goes on to declare that he has decided not to read it : "Shourie gave the final touches to the manuscript of his book on Islam, a work so vicious and perverted that every English speaking Muslim I know was outraged... I decided then to show my solidarity with secularism by not reading the book." (The book he refers to, is apparently Shourie's Religion in Politics, a very sane and sober look at several Scriptures in the light of reason.)"

"The problem of book-banning and censorship on Islam criticism is compounded by the related problem of self- censorship. Thus, when in late 1992, the famous columnist Arun Shourie wanted to publish a collection of his columns on Islamic fundamentalism, esp. the Rushdie and Ayodhya affairs (Indian Controversies), the publisher withdrew at the last moment, afraid of administrative or physical reprisals, and the printer also backed out. Earlier, Shourie had been lucky to find one paper willing to publish these columns, for most Indian newspapers strictly keep the lid on Islam criticism. Hindu society is a terrorized society."

"Arun Shourie was sacked as Indian Express editor, apparently under government pressure, after revealing that, in October 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh had aborted his own compromise arrangement on Ayodhya under pressure from Imam Bukhari, prominent member of the BMAC."

"Or take A Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, PhD from Syracure NY and stunningly successful Disinvestment Minister in the AB Vajpayee Government, when India scored its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India (with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e. a state in which all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the bedrock on which the “experts” have built their view of modern India, they have never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep on repeating their own deluded assumption, as in: “The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.” (Actually, the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics, the established “academic” view is not just defective, it is an outrageous failure."

"The only ray of light in this encircling gloom was Arun Shourie, the veteran journalist and the chief editor of the Indian express at that time. On February 5, 1989, he frontpaged an article, Hideaway Communalism, showing that while the Urdu version of a book by Maulana Hakim Sayid Abdul Hai of the Nadwatul-Ulama at Lucknow had admitted that seven famous mosques had been built on the sites of Hindu temples, the English translation published by the Maulana’s son, Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (Ali Mian) had eschewed the “controversial evidence”. He also published in the Indian Express three articles written by me on the subject of Islamic iconoclasm. This was a very courageous defiance of the ban imposed by Islam and administered by Secularism, namely, that crimes committed by Islam cannot even be whispered in private, not to speak of being proclaimed in public."

"He dismisses Arun Shourie by pigeon-holing him as ‘post-modern’. He does not know that Hinduism has its own view of Time, and that a person who serves Sanatana Dharma cannot be dated. Scholars like Arun Shourie belong neither to the past, nor to the present, nor yet to the future. They belong to a timeless span."

"Just then Shourie was sacked as its editor. The reason was not so much the article, but, apparently, his entire policy of including columns by Hindu communalists like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, and his own articles that debunked some of the prevalent secularism, such as Hideaway Communalism."

"I thank particularly my friend Arun Shourie because we need people like Arun Shourie to challenge us so that we can rectify our mistakes and all together collectively move towards the creation of a new India, a new humanity."

"It is clear that Witzel himself has a political agenda: note his resentment of the “present Indian (right wing) denouncement of the ‘eminent historians’ of Delhi” (§9) – some of these “eminent historians” actively collaborated with Witzel and Farmer in their recent media-blitz in the Indian press. The reader is invited to go carefully through Arun SHOURIE’s book “Eminent Historians” (1998), which is being referred to here, and see the kind of political scholarship to whose defense Witzel has no compunctions in rushing!"

"As for Shourie, Mukhia is hardly revealing a secret with his information that Shourie “does journalism for a living”. The greatest investigative journalist in India by far, he has indeed unearthed some dirty secrets of Congressite, casteist and Communist politicians. His revelations about the corrupt financial dealings between the Marxist historians and the government-sponsored academic institutions are in that same category: fearless and factual investigative journalism. Shourie has a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Syracuse University in U.S.A., which should attest to a capacity for scholarship, even if not strictly in the historical field. When he criticizes the gross distortions of history by Mukhia’s school, one could say formally that he transgresses the boundaries of his specialism, but such formalistic exclusives only hide the absence of a substantive refutation."

"When Shourie's articles first appeared, they aroused great emotions and savage attacks. He quoted from the Bible and the Quran extensively on the question of co-existence. Many were shocked.... Shourie has called his book, Religion in Politics; someday he should bring out another book, Politics in Religion....The first book discusses politics complicated by religions factors; the second would discuss religions which are essentially political..."