Arun Shourie, BJP and F A Hayek

I merely site some of the emerging order here, yet political, for the moral order we do not know how much time it will take India! If any one is familiar with Professor Hayek’s ideas know better that Mr Arun had misinterpreted Hayek idea of Rule of Law.

Arun Shourie said during the first Dhirubhai Ambani Memorial Lecture addressed by the then President Kalam “……..and I am just paraphrasing Professor Hayek on how law evolves — by exceeding the limits in which those restrictions sought to impound them, they helped create the case for scrapping those regulations, they helped make the case for Reforms.”

Take for example of ET letters:

• “Mr M K Venu is right in his analysis (ET, July 15) of the effect of Arun Shourie’s remarks at the Dhirubhai Ambani Memorial Lecture and his so-called 180 degree turn (read, “a complete volte face”). He mentions his war, alongside S Gurumurthy, against Ambani, but sanitises it by saying that “Reliance had done something in excess of what it had been permitted to do”. Yet, the charge then was that Reliance had smuggled in its entire Patalganga plant.
• Whether he had been right or not, Shourie is now in a bind: Reliance has survived him as well as Gurumurthy, leaving him to explain his past vis-a-vis the firm even as he conforming to today’s political order.
• That explains why Shourie uses a technique that all demagogues employ: the idea is that a startling confession at the outset can excuse the most outrageous sayings. Reliance, once accused of breaking the law for its own gain, is seen to have laid the foundations of liberalisation, a la Hayek!
• This is a misreading of Hayek. As Venu shows, Hayek argued against arbitrary official action that stultified commerce, or targeted some particular business. He instead argues for greater legal certainty as a foundation for the rule of law. He did not say it is permissible to flout the rule of law. That would not do in any civilised society. That Shourie said it is OK to subvert the law (if you are impelled by a higher purpose, albeit a well concealed one) is worth remembering.”

M K Venu said in his article in the ET

• “Shourie then paraphrased what Austrian economist Freidrich von Hayek, the guru of most believers in free enterprise capitalism, had said: "…by exceeding the limits in which those restrictions sought to impound them, they helped create the case for scrapping those regulations"

What the BJP Volunteers should be familiar with here is the list but to note take one: “Understand party ideology and propagate it. Have you read Pundit Deendayal Upadhyaya's philosophy of Integral Humanism ? Have you read the works of Savarkar, Guruji Golwalkar, Advaniji (My Country My Life), Arun Shourie, Vivekananda, Friedrich Hayek (Road to Serfdom), Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Francois Gautier etc.”