By Nandiraju Radhakrishna, Senior Journalist
A trade unionist, a socialist and a politician, George Fernandes, who rose from the streets of Mumbai to the corridors of power, born on June3, 1930 in Mangalore.
At the age of 16, he was sent to a seminary to be trained as Catholic priest, disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the church, he moved to Bombay in search of employment. He was attracted to Socialist Party of Ram Manohar Lohia and slowly entered trade union movement.
Very short period, he became the uncrowned king of the taxi drivers’ union, in the early 1950s. With his unruly shock of hair framing his lean, bespectacled face, and dressed in his trademark crumpled khadi kurta-pyjama and scuffed chappals, Fernandes looked every bit the fiery activist. He was — a “rebel without a pause” as some dubbed him. And he was often jailed for taking part in agitations.
He rose to prominence after his surprise victory in the 1967 parliamentary elections, over a Congress veteran in Mumbai. George’s political evolution and traces the course of the Socialist Party in India from its inception to its dissolution into the Janata Party in the late 1970s is remarkable. In 1967, Fernandes stood against the veteran Congress leader S.K. Patil and stunned the ruling party by defeating the Congress strongman in his Bombay South parliamentary constituency. After his victory he earned the nickname “George the giant killer”.
Fernandes took over as chairman of the All-India Railwaymen’s Federation in November 1973. He called a nationwide railway strike on 8 May 1974 to redress grievances of the railway staff, having pending issues for more than two decades. This was in the zenith of his union activity, and soon it culminated into a major workers movement as soon the electricity workers, transport workers and taxi drivers joined the strike showing solidarity with the railway workers. This led to arrest of Fernanades along with thousands of workers.
The then government, led by Indira Gandhi looked upon the strike as a manifestation of violence and indiscipline in the country and thousands were removed from jobs and even evicted from their official quarters. Often described as a rebel, he pursued every cause and took up with passionate devotion, heedless of the many ups and downs in his life.
He fought for the rights of dock and municipal workers of Bombay through the emergency, which he resisted by going underground. His fights were always persistent and single-handed. Considered as one of the most prominent leaders of the socialist movement in the 1970s, George Fernandes was a senior Janata Dal leader before he founded the Samata Party.
1975 Emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government, arrested Fernandes for what was dubbed the “Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy” to blow up government establishments and railway tracks. He contested the 1977 election from jail and won the Muzaffarpur constituency in Bihar by a landslide.
Fernandes became a hero of the Emergency. He was made minister when the Janata Party came to power in 1977 with Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. One of his prominent acts at the time was to force the exit of Coca Cola and IBM, which had refused to dilute their stake in their Indian associates. Coke left India and returned only two decades later.
As Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Defence Minister, between 1998 and 2004, Fernandes oversaw the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998 and the Kargil war.
Already under attack over the “Coffin Gate” scandal – he was later absolved by two commissions of inquiry – George Fernandes stepped down as the Defence Minister in 2001 after the Tehelka expose that cast a shadow on his final years in office. He was back as Defence Minister eight months later.
Fernandes can spoke ten languages — Konkani, English, Hindi, Tulu, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and Latin. Konkani was his mother tongue. He learnt Marathi and Urdu in jail and Latin while he was in the seminary in his early youth. He was fluent in Hindi and English. Fernandes represented best of India’s political leadership. Apart from the defence ministry during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, Mr Fernandes held several ministerial portfolios including communications, industry and railways.
His biography opens a window to George’s political evolution and traces the course of the Socialist Party in India from its inception in 1930s to its dissolution into the Janata Party in the late 1970s. One of the most prominent leaders of the socialist movement in the 1970s, George Fernandes was a senior Janata Dal leader before he founded the Samata Party. He died at the age of 88 on 29 January 2019, in Delhi following a swine flu infection.
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