AG Noorani: The unyielding advocate who fought for India’s Constitutional integrity

Noorani did not court controversy. But he was not afraid that almost every article or book he wrote irked the powers of the day, Congress once, and the Bharatiya Janata Party since Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister in 1998. Not surprising that after six decades of productive life as one of the most senior advocates in India, public intellectual, researcher and writer, his obituaries could not mention any national Padma award or official recognition. That is a proud medal, too, for a free soul who cared for the citizens and the Constitution, not for the state.

People from other minorities in India, Christians and Sikhs, who too faced genocidal violence in Independent India, would perhaps feel they too would have benefited in their search for justice if he also used his formidable intellect in their cause. Future researchers will notice this vacuum in judicial commentary on the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi and several other states, the Kandhamal arson and rapine in Orissa in 2007 and 2008, and the cumulative suppression of the Dalits and the Tribals. The perpetrators, specially the non-state actor RSS and its spawn, were quite the same as those in the Babri masjid demolition.

His focus: the larger Muslim issue in India

Some senior journalists also recalled that he targeted Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at a time when he was facing the full might of the military dictator General Ziaul Haq. Bhutto was hanged soon thereafter. But his focus avowedly was on the Kashmir and the larger Muslim issue in India even as he also wrote on, for instance, the freedom struggle, including the trial and hanging of Bhagat Singh, and a narration of ‘the forgotten comradeship’ between Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad
Ali Jinnah and Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Whatever their other differences, both felt passionately about the cause of Indian freedom, he wrote. Jinnah, the future founding father of Pakistan, had defended Tilak in his trial in 1916 on sedition charges. Jinnah won the case. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the originator of what is now India’s second biggest religious festival, the Ganesh Festival in Maharashtra, was a free man.

Noorani’s book, Islam and Jihad: Prejudice Versus Reality (2001), gave general readers a history and understanding of concepts needed to counteract the Islamophobia which was then raising its head across the globe — and is now entrenched — following brutalities of fundamentalists whom Noorani saw as imposters misusing the faith as a political weapon. His book on the Hyderabad annexation by then Maj Gen JN Chaudhuri’s “police action” on the orders of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, The Destruction of Hyderabad (2014), goes contrary to the popular discourse encouraged both by the Congress governments down the decades and its successor BJP governments. During the dynastic rule of the Nizam’s, its private troops and associates called the Razakars ran a brutal regime, tough on religious minorities. The Army-run new government turned a blind eye to the massacre of Muslims after the takeover.

Noorani scrutinised diplomatic exchanges between the government of India and the government of Hyderabad during the Raj, and after Partition and Independence in 1947, and unearthed the Sunderlal Committee report on the massacre of the Muslim population of the state during and after the ‘police action’ — a “clandestine working territorial nationalism in its bleakest and most shameful hour.” Noorani wrote: “The lowest estimates, even those offered privately by apologists of the military government, came to at least ten times the number of murders with which previously the Razakars were officially accused”. That is not a book people want to sell or buy. Gen Chaudhuri went on to become chief of the army staff in due course before retiring abroad as a famous professor of military sciences.

On the RSS and the BJP

Noorani wrote copiously on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the political progeny of the Bharatiya Janata Party [Jana Sangh in its first incarnation] and the havoc their surge for power wrought on the Indian landscape and its people in the toll following the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. He would rank with the top academics specialising on the politics and violence of the militant doctrine of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, along with Shamsul Islam of Delhi University, Audrey Truschke, Walter Anderson, and Christophe Jaffrelot.

He dived deep for historical facts, basic archival research, on the founders of the RSS and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, writing to make the dangerous nuances understood to common newspaper and magazine readers as much as to the scholar and the academic. Of several tomes on the subject, the two books — The RSS and the BJP: A Division Of Labour and (2000) and The RSS: A Menace to India (2019) — ought indeed to be on the working desk of anyone trying to understand the ground impact of the ten years of the Narendra Modi regime, and indeed of the three times that Atal Behari Vajpayee took oath as the Prime Minister. A Division of Labour makes clear that despite all the protestations and the money spent on cleansing and burnishing the image, the RSS remains the entity that indicted the reports of several judicial commissions down the years. These refresh memories as we read of the government removing the ban on government servants from joining the RSS. Now everyone from a low-ranking municipal employee to the secretaries to the government from the Indian Administrative Service can also be cadres of the RSS and participate in its military drills and ideological training. President Draopadi Murmu has not yet spoken on the merits of the RSS or that she was ever associated with it in her native Orissa – possibly because the RSS does not admit women for whom it has a separate group. But Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, in his ex-officio role as the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, has gone beyond the official laundering of the Sangh, and burnished it till it glitters so much as gold.

“RSS is a global think tank of the highest order. This organisation bears unimpeachable credentials, composed of people who are deeply committed to serving the nation selflessly… contributing for national welfare, our culture, and everyone should, as a matter of fact, take pride in any organisation. I will not permit honourable members (of the Rajya Sabha) to single out an organisation which is doing national service. RSS has all the rights to contribute for national growth, for national development... I hereby rule that RSS is an organisation that has full constitutional rights to participate in the development journey of this nation,” Dhankhar announced in a sitting of the Upper House of Parliament.

In his book, Savarkar and Hindutva: The Godse Connection (2002), Noorani pierced through the hype of Hindu Mahasabha and RSS claims to nationalism and Savarkar’s projection now as a supreme nationalist figure. Noorani found Savarkar’s letters of desperate apology sent to British officials from the Andamans jail, seeking pardon. Noorani also exposed the contradictions in the RSS’s claim to being a ‘cultural’ and philanthropic organisation. He eventually laid his hands on the details about the RSS’s income tax and other financial documents. “Their activities seem nothing but downright anti-national, subversive and violent” as Jawaharlal Nehru himself wrote in his 1948 letter to M. S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS. Noorani says in the Preface: “To evade income tax it claimed to be a charitable organisation before the Income Tax Officer. It said the opposite to the Charity Commissioner to escape registration as a charitable trust.”

But it is in the twin books, The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour and The RSS: A Menace to India that Noorani made it clear to the meanest intelligence that “the RSS, the fomenter of targeted violence, posed a bigger threat to national polity than just to the lives, liberty and properties of Muslims and others.” These books will become an invaluable resource in the years to come as the RSS, now at all levels of the state apparatus and of society, will whitewash its past with the same alacrity and efficiency as it cleanses the sins and crimes of politicians who desert their parties and join it at crucial moments.

His face: A sculptor’s delight

Noorani wrote with equal lucidity on the issue of Kashmir, from the time of the ascension of the state to the Indian Union through the terrible erosion of liberty and basic human rights of an entire population under the gaze of an overwhelming military, indicting almost all regimes at the Centre for the bloodshed and the dehumanising of the people of the valley. All this under the cover of Indian sovereignty in which the state was an inalienable part of the geography of the nation, and thereby beyond questioning in international fora. It was also hands-off in real terms for critics within the state and rest of the country who courted the wrath of the government and its surveillance and intelligence agencies. Reviewers noted that Noorani, moved by the plight of the Kashmiri people, blamed virtually all British Pakistani and Indian leaders, including Sheikh Abdullah and Sardar Patel.

In Noorani’s eyes, Jawaharlal Nehru was the most to be castigated. Nehru, he said, lied to Parliament, dismissed Abdullah’s government, and arrested him on charges “he knew to be false.” The Kashmir Dispute, 1947-2012 (2013) became known for quoting texts of rare documents, like the Pakistani and Indian drafts of the non-war pact which never materialised, various British and American documents on Kashmir, the American proposal for Kashmir’s Partition, the text of the author’s interview with Musharraf in August 2006, the details of Musharraf’s plan, the draft of a new article to replace the Indian Constitution’s Article 370, which gives a special status to India-held Kashmir, and the correspondence among Jinnah, Mountbatten, and Nehru. Article 370 was abrogated by Modi in his second term, and the state was divided into two Union Territories.

Noorani, however, did not fully explore fully what — to several people working on rights issues in Kashmir, and outside — had seemed an additional layer of disquiet, the growing Islamophobia in the men of the central forces posted there in a total strength of a few hundreds of thousands. Indians, and the international rights community, was shocked when an Indian army major tied a Kashmiri man to the front of the military jeep as a human shield against civilian protesters armed with no more than stones.

“Gafffurbhai,” as his short list of friends called him, was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1930 and became a lawyer in the Bombay High Court in 1953. But his heart lay in research and writing, as his obit writers from Mumbai have noted, among them Teesta Setalvad, who worked with him closely on matters relating to the 2002 Gujarat violence and before that, of the Mumbai and Bhiwandi anti-Muslim violence following the bomb blasts in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition. He ended up authoring over a dozen books on constitutional law, politics, and history.

Among those whose tributes paint a wholesome portrait of Noorani, the man, are Setalvad, human rights activist Ravi Nair, former BBC Correspondent Qurban Ali; each one of them also documents Noorani’s growth as a penetrating researcher whose work showed the path to journalists and academics, and any lawyer who cares to raise these issues in the Supreme court. Not many exist now. And that is a pity.

Postscript: Noorani had an interesting face, which would be a sculptor’s delight, with a patrician nose and a possibly arrogant mien. Even the most warm eulogy by a friend could not be illustrated with a photograph of a smiling Noorani. His frown, that scowl, became a defining feature that was meant, as friends point out, to keep fawning pests and “society type” flies away.