But there is a more universal and damaging charge Shourie faces: intellectual dishonesty. His political peers in the BJP sneer at his high moral posture. It is not elevated concern for Jaswant Singh’s right to write that triggered his outburst, they allege, it is pique against Advani for picking Arun Jaitley over him as Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and Narendra Modi for denying him a ticket for his next Rajya Sabha term: petty motives behind the lofty stance. Yet others mock his certitudes. Why doesn’t he enter the trenches, get his hands dirty, and win an election before he lectures us all on probity? Why invite the RSS to takeover the party, say others, when he, protective of his brand value, has always been careful to distance himself officially from them, no matter how congruent their views? (Lalit Vachani’s 1992 documentary Boy in a Branch has a cameo of Shourie raising a saffron flag and speaking at an RSS gathering. He thanks them for inviting him to such a “pure place” and asserts they must achieve the aims of the Ayodhya movement.)

There are other stickier instances. On July 7, 2003, at the first Dhirubhai Ambani Memorial Lecture — an event addressed by President Kalam and attended by everyone ranging from Manmohan Singh to Narendra Modi — Shourie confessed to a “180 degree turn” on Ambani. For five years, as Indian Express editor, he and S Gurumurthy, an accountantturned- Goenka-confidante and an RSS man, had scorched Ambani for his corruptions. It wasn’t merely that Dhirubhai Ambani had imported an entire textile plant without paying customs, or that he was producing more than his permit, they tracked how the government was favouring him; how he owned shell companies; how he had both banks and politicians in his pocket; how, in short; he was subverting society.

At the lecture though, Shourie sloughed off all those years of platinum outrage with cynical ease. As Disinvestment Minister in the Vajpayee government, he had already sold controlling shares of the giant government-controlled petrochemical company, IPCL to the Ambanis — creating a massive private monopoly. (Journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta argues that this itself was an intellectual dishonesty, coming from a man who had championed fair and free markets all his life.) Now at the lecture, taking refuge in economist Frederick Hayek’s argument that when rules ossify and become outdated, society starts violating those rules until conditions evolve where new rules come into play, Shourie claimed he had come to revise his view of the Ambanis.

“Most would say today that those restrictions and conditions should not have been there in the first place,” he told the glittering audience, “that they are what held the country back. And that the Dhirubhais are to be thanked, not once but twice over: they set up world-class companies and facilities in spite of those regulations, and thus laid the foundations for the growth all of us claim credit for today…