By Arun Shourie
Penguin Random House India 2022
While journalistic myth often glorifies the lone-ranger reporter, the biggest political scoop of the past century - the uncovering the Watergate scandal - was the achievement of two individuals, both journalists, working in tandem: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post. A similar partnership of two fearless and defiant individuals, formed in the early 1980s, rocked institutions and governments out of their sloth and slumber in India. This happened at the Indian Express. The first partner was Ramnath Goenka, the redoubtable founder of the Indian Express, while the other was Arun Shourie who was catapulted from the cosy job of a World Bank/ Planning Commission economist into becoming the front man of the newspaper.
The Indian Express has had a reputation of being an anti-establishment paper that epitomised press freedom with its defiance of governments irrespective of the party in power. But ever since Shourie joined the Express in January 1979 he took the newspaper to new and unscaled heights with some of the biggest scoops in the paper's history. And he had the complete backing of its maverick owner Ramnath Goenka. Together they took up issues of great social concern in India - political corruption, administrative apathy, legislative lacunae, flaws of law, et al - with missionary zeal.
The work done by Arun Shourie and his colleagues at the Indian Express exposed political corruption in India like never before. They nailed malfeasance. They railed against the misuse of institutions. They nailed the lies of politicians, including a Deputy Prime Minister and a Prime Minister. The paper's exposé of political corruption - from the wrongdoings of A. R. Antulay, the Congress CM of Maharashtra, to the Bofors scandal involving PM Rajiv Gandhi - led to the disgrace and downfall many among the high and mighty. The Indian Express highlighted the plight of undertrial prisoners in India and exposed the shortcomings of law that kept lakhs of such undertrials languishing in jails for decades. The efforts of the paper led to the freeing of more than 40,000 such undertrials. The Express also went on to expose police brutality culminating into the blindings in Bhagalpur and the illegal trafficking of women in the country, foiled strikes in Bombay and Delhi editions of the newspaper, questioned the wisdom of sitting judges as also the heads of judicial commission, uncovered suppressed reports including the Thakkar Commission's which had questioned R.K. Dhawan's role in the killing of Indira Gandhi.
The editor and his band of dedicated reporters were so involved in the pursuit of such lost causes that Shourie was branded as 'the polemicist turned pamphleteer...a stormy petrel, something of a maverick.' ''This is not journalism. This is pamphleteering. Our job is to give news, not run campaigns'', the critics cried out. But the newspaper owner was mighty pleased. At one of such high point of time Ramnath Goenka walked into Shourie's cabin and exclaimed, "Main tumharey office ke baahar ek Board lagaaunga: The Commissioner for Lost Causes." The book's title is taken from here only.
At almost 600 pages it's a lengthy yet engaging tome that gives an insider's account of the various top notch work of journalism that Arun Shourie and his colleagues did at the Indian Express. Aside from writing about the issues that the paper doggedly followed when he was at the helm, Shourie also writes with empathy about his relationship with India's most colourful newspaper baron of the time. For it indeed took two to tango, especially while pursuing key social issues to the bitter end.
The reviewer is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand