One of India’s finest intellectuals, Abdul Ghafoor Noorani, a renowned Constitutional expert, a distinguished lawyer, and a political analyst, is no more. Ailing for a long time, Noorani, or Ghafoor bhai, as his friends called him, was laid to rest at a cemetery in Mumbai after Isha prayers. He was 94. Not one to call it quits, he was in the process of putting together a fresh book on the Supreme Court’s Babri Masjid verdict, when death snatched him away.
A trained lawyer, he began his writing career in the early 1960s. He wrote long and passionately. Fearless and fair, he spoke truth to power. He called Narendra Modi the “Tughlaq” of our times for his Central Vista project in 2020 just as he had equated Indira Gandhi’s actions with those of Adolf Hitler when writing about the Emergency. Likewise, on the jacket of his book, The RSS: A Menace to India, he made bold to reproduce Jawaharlal Nehru’s quote on the ideological fountainhead of the BJP, writing, “It would appear that the declared objectives [of the RSS] have little to do with the real ones…these real objectives appear completely opposed to the decisions of the Indian Parliament…and the Constitution of India”. An authority on the Kashmir affairs, his views were equally profound on the Ayodhya mosque-temple dispute about which he did three books besides scores of columns over the years. Equally, he could quote any Article of the Constitution with natural ease and often drew parallels with the Constitution of other countries in his writings. He ws not a trained historian, but his facts were seldom disputed, and his interpretations widely debated.
Columns by A.G. Noorani for The Hindu
Feared in legal circles and respected on the literary circuit, Noorani was a no-nonsense man who suffered no fools. Equally, he never forgot a good deed. Having written for long for dailies such as The Statesman and The Indian Express besides Dawn in Pakistan, Noorani was a columnist for The Hindu’s sister publication, Frontline, for a little over three decades before infirmities of advancing years made it increasingly difficult to put pen to paper for the widely read column. The column was often a mirror to India’s unending battles with its history and politics. Often running to about 3,000 words, when the issue overtook him, he let his pen flow like a river in the mountains. Then he wrote even 5,000 words on the subject.
An old timer, he used to do his column with a pen before getting his written words typed into neat sheets by a stenographer in Mumbai which were then faxed to the magazine’s office. His house was a book lover’s delight as was his library of newspaper clippings. Painstakingly, he used to first mark the articles of interest in the morning before neatly making the clippings and filing them according to the subject. Over the years, the files got overloaded, but he never once forgot about the placement of a particular file. He never used a writing table and did his writing sitting on his cot, surrounded with hundreds of books, and many cushions. For decades, he didn’t use a computer.
Not a great practitioner of field research, he read extensively, and quoted with generosity and accuracy. A devout Muslim who would not entertain visitors during his prayer time, he was a unique mixture of abiding humility and occasional fits of temper. Proud of his membership of Gymkhana Club in Mumbai and India International Centre in New Delhi where he used to stay only in room number 38, he had his eccentricities. Once on a flight, he was asked by a hostess about his food preference, and he blurted out, “Anti-veg!” Indeed, he was a lover of food. He would read about food and make mental notes about going to a certain restaurant and even roadside eateries. In Delhi, he would often take a cycle rickshaw to the serpentine bylanes of old Delhi looking for a particular gola kabab or qorma. Of course, he would often round off his meal with a sit-down dinner at the famous Karim’s or Jawahar restaurant.
Born in Bombay, he spent much of his life in the city where his unique wit, rare intellect and profound knowledge of Constitutional matters made him a man everybody looked up to. Unsurprisingly, even political leaders like Farooq Abdullah and Asaduddin Owaisi paid their respects at his departure.
