Four clips that prove Arun Shourie is an expert political troll (and one making fun of Arnab Goswami)
Of all the nasty things anyone associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party has said of the Narendra Modi-ruled government, nothing has been as scathing in its biting brevity as Arun Shourie terming the government's policies "Congress scaled, plus a cow." With all the brouhaha of late, over matters of to beef or not to beef, the comment was like that of a Shakespearean jester pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
The Bharatiya Janta Party declared on Tuesday that Shourie, a former union minister in the previous National Democratic Alliance government, was no longer a member since he hadn't "renewed" his membership in the party. This may not be entirely surprising, because Shourie falls into that small set of former BJP leaders who haven't been afraid to speak their mind about Modi.
In May this year in an interview to India Today, Shourie had already called out what he thought was mismanagement of economic policy, the troika of Modi, Amit Shah and Arun Jaitely who were running the government and terrifying everyone else, the Prime Minister's silence on important issues while commenting on things relatively inane, like a victory in a Tennis match. Excerpts from that interview can be watched here.
He termed the government not just anti-intellectual but also anti-intellect in December 2014 — a prophecy on situations like the FTII deadlock to come.
The last time Shourie raked up a big storm for the Bharatiya Janta Party was back in 2009 when he called it the "Humpty Dumpty party" and labelled then party president Rajnath Singh "Alice in Blunderland." This was on the Shekhar Gupta-hosted show Walk the Talk. He likened the party to a "kite without a string" and called for the party leadership to be changed.
An active right winger who has been more forthright than most on the way minorities are treated, he wrote a book The World of fatwas or the Sharia in Action in 1995. In the video below he talks about the idea of secularism, while discussing his book and says the purpose of the book was not to run down Islam.
His party aside, the veteran journalist-politician's most famous bit of trolling might have been when he mimicked Times Now chief Arnab Goswami at an event called the Manthan Samvaad, held at Hyderabad in October 2013.