Journalistic coup: Arun Shourie exposes Maharashtra CM A.R. Antulay's collection of funds
Almost overnight Arun Shourie, the executive editor ot the Indian Express, became a national "hero". In a swift bloodless journalistic coup, Shourie achieved the impossible - exposing Maharashtra's blue-eyed boy, Chief Minister A.R. Antulay's collection of funds. Behind the barbed-wire writings is a man with a cause, a solitary chronicler holding up the mirror to degenerate political values. A profile on the media's lone crusader and his work.
As the sordid Antulay saga unfolded over the next two weeks, challenging the institution of Parliament and its presiding officers, involving the prime minister and the finance minister, and mobilising the Opposition and ruling parties in a series of assaults, the focus never shifted from the witch originator of the mammoth media exercise: the lone, crusading figure sitting in his newspaper office, slowly but single-mindedly compiling evidence, cultivating sources and collecting clues before mounting the most savage scenario indicting public and political life in modem Indian times.
What has since come to be known as India's Watergate - or Antulay's Trustgate scandal - was the result of no random leak, no subversive hint surreptitiously passed on, nor the sum total of common tittle-tattle gleaned from a bunch of squealers; it was a consciously studied and calculatedly pursued investigation of organised corruption in high places, a meticulously-researched exposure with supporting evidence that ran into 7,500 words and 140 column-inches of blistering copy.
In one fell blow, one journalist had achieved the impossible: of not only putting together the pieces of a complex financial puzzle, but presenting them in the highly personalised charge of not a hack polemicist but a pulpit preacher.
If you didn't believe the facts of the now-famous "Indira Gandhi As Commerce" article that morning, you had to believe its driving tone. If you didn't buy the cold chart of documented disputation, you had to buckle under the oratory. As Opposition MP Piloo Mody, who chanted "Antulay, Antulay" non-stop for a whole 20 minutes to drown out attempts by ruling party MPs to change the subject in the Rajya Sabha, later remarked: "Can you imagine the improved state of the nation if we had 10 Arun Shouries working instead of one?" Not surprisingly, the object of his attack disagreed. Said Antulay: "He is not the conscience keeper of the country."