Ansari honours A.G. Noorani as a 'one-man institution' at Delhi memorial lecture
A.G. Noorani was remembered in New Delhi as a polymath and fierce defender of civil liberties, with a collection of his writings released at the event.
Former Vice-President M. Hamid Ansari paid tribute to the late columnist and legal scholar A.G. Noorani at a memorial lecture in New Delhi on Friday, describing him as a "polymath" and a "one-man institution".
The event, held at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, also saw the release of The Noorani Records, a publication of The Hindu Group bringing together some of the writer's most significant work. Noorani wrote for The Hindu and Frontline for close to four decades.
Speaking on the theme "Remembering a Polymath: The Life and Times of Abdul Ghafoor Noorani", Ansari said the writer's career reflected an abiding commitment to justice, civil liberties, minority rights, secularism and constitutional governance. He placed Noorani among the sharpest minds on constitutional law, noting that although he was not a grassroots reporter, he grasped the pulse of the nation and worked in a manner distinctly his own.
Ansari recalled the regard in which Noorani was held by lawyers in the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court. From constitutional amendments and the Anti-Defection Bill of more than three decades ago to the more recent Citizenship (Amendment) Act, he said, Noorani wrote with rare perspicacity. Kashmir, too, featured in his work, which traced its "troughs and crests".
Much of the address centred on Noorani's defence of human rights and constitutional freedoms. Ansari described him as a fierce champion of civil liberties and minority rights at a time when state power and legislation raised difficult questions for individual freedoms. His writing, Ansari said, repeatedly scrutinised state overreach, secularism and religious equality, grounded in a defence of fundamental freedoms and an opposition to oppressive law and injustice.
Born in erstwhile Bombay into the Kutchi Memon community, Noorani was a private man who did not mix easily and devoted his time to reading and writing. After his death, his large library was sent to the Jharkhand High Court after some lawyers objected to a proposal to house the collection in the Bombay High Court.
Ansari also traced the range of Noorani's scholarship. Among his early works was a 1963 biography of then President Zakir Husain, which carried a foreword by Jayaprakash Narayan praising Husain's "active, creative, refined, dedicated, fearless and truthful" life, and included a reproduction of M.F. Husain's portrait of Noorani. In The Trial of Bhagat Singh: Politics of Justice, he argued that Bhagat Singh and a colleague had suffered a miscarriage of justice amounting to judicial murder. His study of the India-China boundary dispute from 1846 to 1947 examined the historical roots of a major foreign-policy challenge, an account Ansari described as blending history, law, morality and political expediency.
Former Union Ministers Salman Khurshid and Mani Shankar Aiyar were among those present, along with diplomats, bureaucrats and authors.