“Second,” said he, “by exceeding the limits in which those restrictions sought to impound them, they helped create the case for scrapping those regulations, they helped make the case for reforms.”

It is true everyone has the right to revise their views and Dhirubhai’s entrepreneurship dazzled even greater men, but challenge Shourie about the other and continuing Ambani corruptions he had documented at the Express, and he says, “I was merely the editor, it’s Gurumurthy who wrote those stories. I did think they were brilliant and excavatory then.”

(In an uncharacteristic and revealing moment of self-irony though, he confesses his friend Gurumurthy had once challenged him: “If Hayek is right, everyone can become a violator and say they are breaking laws for a better future. Who will judge which laws should be broken?” Shourie says only half-laughingly, “I told him, I’ll be the judge of that.”)

Congress politician and Shourie’s college mate in St. Stephen’s, Mani Shankar Aiyar remembers a different Shourie. A hockey player, a teachers’ pet, an animated young man who fought fierce arguments in defence of Nehru and cooperatives. “Where has that Arun Shourie of Rudra Court (a St. Stephen’s residence) gone? It is a great loss to our national life,” says he, “that instead of a great Nehruvian flowering, this intelligent man transmogrified into a fanatic Hindu right-winger. I think the leavening of a liberal education at Stephen’s was undermined by his four years at the fourth-rate Syracuse University during the worst years of the Cold War. This is what first moved him towards the Right, and from there to the usual positions of nationhood and Hindutva. Today, Shourie is just a 1920s Arya Samaji disguised as a BJP MP of the 21st century.”

‘Not an eye for an eye. For an eye, both eyes. not a tooth for a tooth. for a tooth, the whole jaw,’ says Shourie

Many before Shourie have made political and intellectual journeys a pendulum away from where they began. That, in itself, cannot be an indictment. Rather, what makes Shourie especially disturbing is the comet’s tail: the incandescent zeal and certitude he carries around like a transferrable ticket for whichever new station he’s headed. As historian Ramachandra Guha puts it, “Much of the time Shourie writes or acts as if there is a singular truth, with him as its only repository and guarantor.”

In another sticky instance of intellectual dishonesty, after the Mumbai 26/11 attack Shourie spoke with messianic passion in Parliament for a harder, more unforgiving State. Gone was the sensitive constitutionalist. Gone was the foundermember of Jayaprakash Nar ayan’s human rights group, the PUCL. Gone was the man who had crusaded for victims of false encounters and the blinded undertrials of Bhagalpur. (He had written then, “If the criminal justice system breaks down, your eyes and mine are not safe.”) Shourie had already, long years earlier, moved away from his commitment to human rights to an endorsement of TADA, POTA and the use of unquestioned State force to quell internal insurgencies: the KPS Gill position. Now, in Parliament, he argued with even greater fervour for dismantling the human rights movement and “unnecessary” legalism around terror suspects (never mind if innocents suffered in the process). As for Pakistan, nobody, he said, had ever won a war with minimal force. India’s response to Pakistan should be, “Not an eye for an eye. For an eye, both eyes. Not a tooth for a tooth. For a tooth, the whole jaw.” And for good measure, stoke some trouble in Balochistan.

Curiously, even as he has moved away with greater and greater scorn from liberal positions, Shourie has consistently sustained his fascination for liberal institutions: Democracy, Parliament, Judiciary, Constitution. Yet, propelled by a sense of his own infallible integrity, beneath this regard for the State and its institutions, a deeper more dangerous self-image seems to run through Shourie’s public conduct: the idea of Christ whipping the usurers; Mohammad urging righteous war; Krishna urging Arjuna into the fatricidal fields of Kurukshetra.

The voice of Dharma. Justified violence. Coupled with a burning sense of samaj seva.