View: George Fernandes, a leader smaller than himself

George Fernandes was probably India’s most capable politician never to realise his full potential, serving under leaders far inferior to him in calibre and moral fibre. He was a maker and wrecker of parties and governments. He was one of those who split the Janata Party, which had defeated Indira Gandhi after the Emergency, on the issue of dual membership of erstwhile Jan Sangh followers in both the Rashtriya Sawayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Janata Party, yet became the RSS’ trusted confidante and the BJP’s most reliable ally in the Vajpayee-led NDA 1.

He was a self-made leader, a drop-out from a Catholic seminary who never held a formal degree. But he was one of India’s best read political leaders, his house always choke-full of books. Trade union activity led him to socialist politics in Bombay, where he had organised taxi drivers and restaurant workers. An eloquent speaker in Hindi and English, he knew ten languages, including the Konkani and Tulu of his native Mangalore.

Fernandes entered electoral politics by defeating one of the tallest Congress leaders of Maharashtra of the time, SK Patil, in 1967, earning the sobriquet, the giantkiller. Parliamentary politics aided, rather than hindered his trade union activity. He became leader of a railway union and led a major railway strike in 1974 that saw action in different states. This strike was one of the disruptive agitations across the land against corruption and unemployment that finally led to the imposition of Emergency by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi.



Fernandes went into hiding, and organised efforts to blow up, using dynamite, government buildings and even a stage from which Indira Gandhi was supposed to speak, in Baroda. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Baroda dynamite case. He fought the post-Emergency 1977 Lok Sabha elections from behind bars. His constituency was Muzzafarpur in Bihar, a state with a socialist political culture, used to hosting socialist leaders from other states. He won with a huge margin and became the Industries minister in the Morarji Desai-led Janata government, who insisted that IBM and Coca Cola each lower their shareholding in their Indian subsidiary below 40%, leading to their exit from the country.

Fernandes was himself a rebel and supported Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka, assorted Burmese separatist movements, the Tibetan opposition to Beijing and whichever other rebel group sought his support. His official house often hosted rebels his government was probably obliged, by diplomatic relations with other countries, to detain and extradite.

Fernandes had his share of controversies, ranging from delivering thundering speeches for and against the Morarji Desai government within the space of a few days, declaring China to be India’s Enemy Number One, to the Coffingate and Tehelka sting operations. Neither charge of financial impropriety could stick. He was married to Lila Kabir till the mid-‘80s, after which Jaya Jaitly was his companion and political aide.

Sharad Yadav, Nitish Kumar and Mulayam Singh would count Fernandes among those who betrayed them, while he could count them as those who betrayed him. He will be remembered for the Konkan Railway, which he kicked off as rail minister under VP Singh, unwavering hostility to the Congress and the Gandhi family, which saw him sharing the bed with the RSS, and his towering political presence that dwarfed his nominal superiors in politics and transcends his final lapse into loss of memory, both on the part of his own brain and on the part of the public, before clinical death on 29 January 2019.

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