Author: John Elliot
Publication: The Newspaper Today
Date: April 19, 2001
(Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra: in
the Outlook of March 26, 2001, Shri Vinod Mehta, the editor, wrote in an
article as follows: "It is incredible the number of enemies (George Fernandes)
has made in politics and how much journalists detest him.". A politician
always has enemies in politics, irrespective of which party he/she belongs
and which ideology he/she believes in. However, it is intriguing to note
that journalists detest him. The role of the media in a democracy is to
act as an effective communicator in the society. One has to wonder if such
a situation exists in India. The enclosed article gives a further perspective
on the matter.)
Why is everyone always so nasty
about George Fernandes? It seems that a vast majority of people - especially
Delhi's privileged elite - revel in running him down. They accuse him of:
having sold out on his old beliefs (do they still want him to go round
blowing up railway lines, calling strikes, and throwing foreign companies
out of the country?); of harbouring rebels in his house and garden (that
shows he's still got some beliefs doesn't it?); of taking massive bribes
whenever he can to finance his Samata Party (whether that is true or false,
why pick on him?); and of making gaffes over issues like the China factor
in India's nuclear tests (he was right wasn't he?).
The chatterati say that this famous
old lefty has become a maverick, light-weight, and corrupt politician,
prone to public relations disasters - and following the Tehelka tapes revelations,
they have turned their fire on Jaya Jaitly, his companion and Samata Party
ally. Those of a certain age, who admired him in their youth, say that
he has "failed to add value with maturity" and that he has "failed to grow
up". They grumble that he is a political turncoat who sold his socialist
soul when he took his Samata Party into the Bharatiya Janata Party's coalition
government. Then, after being a life-long nuclear disarmament campaigner
with a picture of Hiroshima on his old Defence Ministry office wall, he
supported India's nuclear tests - saying (again correctly) that a non-nuclear
India would be isolated "in a balance of terror" so long as China and the
west kept their nuclear weapons.
During the Kargil conflict, I wrote
an article on Mr Fernandes in The New Statesman, Britain's left-of-centre
weekly magazine. Friends in Delhi told me I was crazy to be devoting a
page of such a magazine to such a turncoat and disappointment. I had however
become fascinated during an earlier visit to his house where I saw a large
poster declaring "Pepsi-Coke Quit India". I admired it and said that surely
it must be quite old (presumably from the 1970s when he kicked Coke out).
"Oh no," he replied, "its actually quite new". Really, how's that, I asked.
"Oh," said Mr Fernandes, "you've got to keep the movement going!"
That was a turn of phrase that I
had heard many times from old British trade union leaders in the 1970s
when I was covering British labour relations. And the throwback is no accident.
Like many Indian politicians of his generation, Mr Fernandes is well versed
in British socialism - he even proudly declared himself a one-time fervent
reader of The New Statesman and said he had bought his first copy in 1964
when visiting a Labour Party annual conference in Scarborough.
Not surprisingly, my article was
headlined "An Old Lefty Goes Off To War - India's socialist defence minister
is still a shop steward at heart". Mr Fernandes had just made constructive
contributions to the Kargil conflict by visiting the front line to boost
the morale of the troops. Earlier, he had gone to the 22,000-ft Siachen
glacier and had been appalled to discover that Ministry of Defence bureaucrats
had idly blocked 14-month old requisitions for new snowmobiles and repairs
to a freezing hospital's central heating system. He ordered the civil servants
to visit Siachen themselves and sent others on regular visits to harsh
border areas. And when he went on an official visit to France in 1998,
he was apparently the first-ever Indian defence minister to visit a cemetery
memorial for Indian soldiers killed in the 1914-18 war: he says it seemed
to him to be the natural thing to do.
Of course, many of these occasions
generated great personal publicity. But a mere publicity seeker would not
have re-visited Siachen 17 times. He told me that he had opposed Coca-Cola's
and IBM's presence in India in the 1970s - and stopped an American-owned
salt processing project in the early 1990s - because the companies were
stealing jobs from Indian employees, not because he opposed all foreign
investment. And he said he despised the Congress Party and its Nehru-Gandhi
dynasty for "talking socialism but doing everything possible to maintain
India's exploitative caste and class traditions". >From Siachen to the
caste issue, these are the reflex actions of a good shop steward who cares
about the welfare of people - while also playing politics.
When I was discussing my article
with a sceptical journalist friend, I tried to argue, with little success,
that Mr Fernandes was different because he cared. Eventually I asked: "What
would you say if I told you that I'd written an article extolling the virtues
of Mulayam Singh Yadav, George's predecessor at Defence?" Her reply was
clear: "I'd say you've been in India for too long, your judgement had gone,
and it was time you left!"
My case rests. As a politician who
genuinely cares for people, Mr Fernandes would be notable in any country:
in India he deserves special respect, even if he sometimes sounds like
an old phoney and behaves like his political peers.
John Elliot is a journalist and
analyst who has lived and worked in India for 11 of the past 17 years.
He now writes for FORTUNE magazine and contributes to the International
Herald Tribune, and the London-based New Statesman.
