WHEN YOU first meet Shourie, it is difficult to square with the discordant orchestral sound that surrounds his public life. He is mild and affable and surprisingly open to conversation. There is also a kind of silence in his spacious Westend home. There is the famous low, whispering voice, the bushy brows, the intelligent eyes, the sophisticated manner. But there is also a tight, fragile, held-in quality — a sense of him constantly steeling himself against the onslaught of life. Shourie’s wife Anita (a great love and another “happy accident” in his life) suffers from Parkinson’s; their son Vikramaditya, now 37, was born prematurely, is severely paraplegic and has had multiple disabilities from birth. Shourie’s parents died within months of each other; his mother suffered immensely before she passed away. Shourie nursed them all, yet bears this unkind history with extraordinary compassion. Minutes into the conversation, his son is wheeled in. Shourie leaps up and kisses him with unaffected tenderness. “This is our son Adit,” he says with moving pride.

Shourie’s son is paraplegic. He says his books on religion were a ‘scream against religious explanations for suffering’

Shourie has written several scathing books on religion, most notoriously on Islam and Christianity, but what is lesser known, also on Hindusim. He once told philosopher Martha Nussbaum that these books were “a scream against the explanations given for suffering” in the Hindu scriptures, Koran and Old and New Testaments. He says now, “Our son’s suffering was the newspeg for my pre-occupation with religion. But everything I found was soporific, so I finally gravitated towards Buddha who said there is no explanation for suffering, but as the nature of our response compounds our suffering, he could help deal with the response.” Since then, Shourie has maintained a strict regimen of yoga and meditation, and in weaker moments, sessions with astrology. Friends say he never makes a show of his duty and is unfailingly solicitous of his wife and son. (It is difficult to fathom, but perhaps the vicissitudes of his private life have unconsciously played some part in his growing and callous impatience with public grief.)

But Buddha is only one part of the complex cocktail of inspirations in Shourie’s life. There was his father HD Shourie, a magistrate in pre-partition Lahore, and later the editor of Common Cause, a pioneering consumer issues journal and litigant that fought many landmark cases for people’s rights, most famously, old people’s pension. There is Gandhi, Nehru and JP — none of whose vision Shourie now shares, but men he still considers giants because they “had no price”, were constantly dialogic and lived with immense personal integrity, an attribute he values highly in himself. At the other end of the spectrum — and part of the contradictions within him that he is blind to — there is Hindu thinker Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, men Shourie calls “deep and courageous thinkers”, who were highly critical of Islam and Christianity.

Swarup, in fact, seems to have been a big catalyst. In 1984, when Shourie was deeply shaken by the anti-Sikh riots, Swarup told him, “If the State neglects its primary duties and fails to act firmly, there is bound to be a reaction in society. The violence against the Sikhs was induced by the Congress; but because of their suppressed grievances, the Hindus appropriated that violence.”

Perhaps the Key to Shourie’s Character — Both His Bigotry And Personal Integrity — Lies In His Arya Samaji Identity

Shourie says the Congress’ handling of Shah Bano and Bhindranwale set him on his journey towards rightwing political positions. But it is Swarup who seems to have set him on the hackneyed track of Hindutva justifications: the logic of grievance and victimhood as explanations for retaliatory violence. So, today, Shourie might condemn the vandalism at the Mangalore pub; but the murder of Swami Laxmanananda explains the arson in Kandhamal; and the burning of the Sabarmati, the pogrom in Gujarat. Why not insist doggedly that the State punish the guilty? Why condone collateral violence? “That is how society reacts,” he shrugs. (So what if his idol Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement because 22 policemen were killed in Chauri Chaura? Shourie has shifting definitions of personal integrity.)

Ask him how he can be unmoved by what happened in Gujarat, and he answers, “I am moved by what happens to individuals, what happens to my son. I don’t care if hundreds of people die somewhere. They die in earthquakes as well.” Shocked, I ask, “Why react so strongly to terror attacks then? “Because that is an assault on the State,” he replies, without a moment’s hesitation. (Set aside obvious humanist values. One could argue that killing hundreds of innocent citizens — be they Muslim, Christian or Hindu — is an assault on the State too, when the State has promised the Right to Life to all citizens. But you sense that for Shourie, it’s a closed argument.)