The passing away of a quintessential rebel

The passing away on Tuesday of the radically progressive George Fernandes is like the socialist’s symbolic final rejection of a prosaic political landscape, where a temple on one side and janau -wielding aspirant on the other routinely strain to manufacture public discourse.

His decade-long debilitating ailments may have numbed this iconic trade unionist of the anti-Emergency movement but his final passage marks a definite end to the lingering reminders about the mettle of the man who took on the Iron Lady and burst on the national consciousness with the Baroda Dynamite case.

George Fernandes, 88, will be long-remembered as a truly modern politician, who unapologetically challenged the status-quo in public and personal spaces, with conviction and charisma that did not need mega-publicity stunts to keep the country in his thrall.

Shift from Left to Right

There is judgment and heartburn from the socialist radicals and unionists on the Left side who watched their adored icon shift rightward. From the fiery trade unionist he was, bringing the entire country to a standstill with the All India Railway strike of 1974, Fernandes was viciously attacked when he joined Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s coalition in the late 1990s.

Tehelka and Defence-gate further convinced his former comrades about the degeneration of a once-shining star.

But Fernandes was too eclectic to care either about the approval of his Left/Liberal comrades or be daunted by his newly-befriended conservative comrades in the BJP and the RSS.

He became Vajpayee’s most trusted trouble-shooter as convenor of the 24-member National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 1999, the first non-Congress alliance to last its full tenure under Vajpayee.

H D Deve Gowda parted ways from Fernandes to launch his Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka while Fernandes floated Janata Dal (United), the only branch of the socialists to have consistently aligned with the BJP, a tradition continued till date by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who went back to the NDA fold after publicly criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP.

This wasn’t the first alliance that Fernandes and his brand of socialists had with the RSS and the BJP’s earlier avatar, the Jana Sangh.

Fernandes was the Industries Minister in Morarji Desai’s Cabinet which included Vajpayee as Foreign Minister and LK Advani as Information and Broadcasting Minister after Indira Gandhi had been trounced in the post-Emergency general elections.

The ‘Baroda dynamite case’

Fernandes famously won the Muzaffarpur seat in Bihar in 1977 without even visiting the constituency as he remained incarcerated for the duration of the elections for the Baroda Dynamite case pertaining to a conspiracy he had allegedly hatched to blow up government buildings and property to protest against the Emergency.

In the Janata cabinet led by Morarji Desai, Fernandes’s positioning is marked by his strident straddling of the socialist wing. He clashed with the American giants, Coca Cola and IBM, for violating the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) and shut down their operations. He argued vehemently against dual membership of the Jana Sangh representatives in the Cabinet — Vajpayee and Advani. They could not be the part of the RSS and be members of the Janata government simultaneously, a controversy that finally resulted in birth of the BJP in 1980.

The socialist stridency lasted about two decades in which he briefly joined the Union government led by VP Singh and left another indelible mark for pushing the Konkan Railway project in his tenure as Railway Minister between December, 1989-November, 1990.

A file photo of George Fernandes

Fernandes switched from being a strong opponent of the RSS members in the Janata Party in the 1970s to Vajpayee’s trusted coordinator in the late 1990s; his stridency now eclipsed by a curious eclecticism. He unapologetically championed pro-democracy movements in the neighbourhood as well as in the North-East and Kashmir even while he served as Defence Minister in Vajpayee’s Cabinet. Business in Fernandes’s official bungalow entailed practically no security detail and an open house for underground rebels in Nepal, Bhutan, progressive protestors, artists, writers and intellectuals and a throng of Burmese dissidents.

The most memorable display of the then Defence Minister’s ideological proclivities was in November 2000, when New Delhi rolled out the red carpet for General Maung Aye, the second-most powerful official in Myanmar’s military junta, after years of stated sympathy for the Burmese pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi. General Aye arrived under international glare, met with Prime Minister Vajpayee and his senior Cabinet colleagues. The only exception was Fernandes, who resolutely refused a meeting with the military leader, choosing to the discomfiture to his boss and senior colleagues, to mingle freely with Burmese dissidents who protested against the military leader’s official visit.

It was to Fernandes that journalists and concerned activists turned when the police arrested a fellow journalist from Kashmir Iftikhar Gilani for violating the Official Secrets Act (OSA). Gilani remained in jail for seven months before the Director-General of Military Intelligence testified in court that there was nothing secret in the documents that the police had produced as evidence of Gilani’s alleged violation of the OSA. The government withdrew charges against the Kashmiri journalist whom the Defence Minister himself phoned after his release to say that the entire episode had, “started a debate on the OSA within the establishment”.

This was quintessential Fernandes, championing individual liberty and Constitution rights over all considerations of position and stature. The first-born son of a Christian Catholic family in Mangalore, who defied his father’s more mundane ambitions for him to become a lawyer to join a seminary at the age of 16.

George Fernandes would remain part of the national consciousness as a politician who was completely transparent and unapologetic about his ideological eclecticism.

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