George Fernandes felt betrayed by Nitish, reveal letters

NEW DELHI: In the manuscripts section on the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in a quiet corner lie the private papers of once-fiery socialist leader George Fernandes. They are yet to be catalogued and put into neat boxes. A closer examination over two days reveals that these files have nothing from Fernandes' tumultuous years from the 1960s, 70s, his leadership of a railway strike, Emergency years, the Baroda Dynamite case or even controversies of the last two decades like the sacking of Vishnu Bhagwat, the Tehelka episode or even the coffin scam.
A major chunk of the Fernandes papers concerning his public and private life remain under the safekeeping of his family, leaving the period between late 1990s to 2009 available for scrutiny. But even here one can discover some rare gems. Like Fernandes being asked by the archbishop of Delhi: 'How about your reconciliation with church and god?' Or the bit where Fernandes hits out at party colleague Nitish Kumar in a 2009 letter to old socialist associate Kumar Aurangabadkar: "What you mention about Nitish is correct. I brought that fellow but he went on to see that I am sidelined." Further research yields another another letter the same year where Fernandes wrote to JD (U) president Sharad Yadav about his desire to contest the Lok Sabha election from Muzaffarpur because as a "socialist I am against entering Rajya Sabha."
The running theme of Fernandes' papers remains his enmity with Indira Gandhi specifically and Congress in particular. In one letter of June 2005 to RSS chief K S Sudarshan, Fernandes admonishes him for praising Indira Gandhi. "I cannot understand how the RSS can admire a person who went to the extent of saying that her Emergency rule meant that even the right to life had been withdrawn as Hitler had done in Germany," he wrote. Fernandes kept the pressure on the Gandhi-Nehru family, be it sending a letter from Sten Lindstrom, Swedish police officer and prime investigator in the Bofors case, to the then PM Manmohan Singh seeking his help or writing to Italian home minister Giuliano Amato, a socialist, to catch Ottavio Quattrocchi of Bofors fame.
Among the hundreds of paper, most of them letters to various UPA ministers seeking help for his constituents, there is one from former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld stating, "It was with dismay that I read press reports indicating that you had not received proper treatment at US airports in 2002 and 2003. I regret that such incidents occurred." Fernandes thanks him for his "sentiments" and talks of how the two closely worked to strengthen the bilateral defence relationship.
It also comes out from the papers that Amar Singh kept Fernandes informed about the petition against him by a Congress sympathizer in the Supreme Court as well about Mayawati gunning for him.
At times one can see shades of the old firebrand. Like in February 2008 when taxi drivers from Bihar and UP were attacked in Mumbai, he wrote an angry letter to Raj Thackeray of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena asking him to read the Constitution and eschew the path of violence if he wants to make a mark as a politician. He also tells him to seek forgiveness from those he had hurt and reminds Thackeray that a similar attack on Fernandes by Congress' S K Patil in 1967 did not pay any dividends.
In 2006, he got into verbal duel with then PM Manmohan Singh who while returning from a foreign trip had said something that Fernandes did not like. Singh spoke to him and wrote to him that the "remark was of a casual nature which was not meant to insult, defame or castigate you."
Fernandes' distrust of China also comes out in a letter to Dalai Lama who informed him about talks between Tibetans and the Chinese government. Fernandes tells the spiritual leader not to trust China as it "wants to rule the world:" "It wants to kill religions, races, culture and all the good that there is in the world. In one word it wants the world to be 'an empire of China', " Fernandes wrote.
Some letters throw light on the personal life of Fernandes like when he sought funds from the Lok Sabha secretariat for wife Leila Kabir's pacemaker implant in 2008. While in another he gets angry with the then home minister Shivraj Patil for not removing his security even after he had ceased to be a minister: 'I got into public life on my own volition and therefore, should be prepared to face all the hazards of public life from character assassination of political opponents and some wayward journalists to terrorists bullet in these times."