The Lonely Fern

Is it the end of the road for George Fernandes, the once-upon-a-time socialist firebrand with the high moral ground? Marginalised within his Samata Party, hounded and abused by his former chelas, ostracised by the Opposition, facing a judicial commission for alleged monies given to party president Jaya Jaitly in his official residence, Fernandes seems at the end of his tether. Little more than a year before general elections, he stands in splendid isolation.

At the core of his current crisis is the Samata Party he helped launch in 1999. In a proxy battle between him and Union railway minister Nitish Kumar, Fernandes appears well and truly cornered.

In the past two months, most of his camp followers from Bihar—MPs Raghunath Jha and Brahmanand Mandal, and mlas Bhai Birendra, Ganesh Paswan and P.K. Sinha—have been removed from the party's primary membership. Ironically, this is attributed to Fernandes' attempts to mollify his detractors. The embarrassment came when Fernandes was in China recently and the deposed legislators issued a hard-hitting statement: "You (Fernandes) have forfeited the moral right to remain defence minister." They described him as "weak and helpless".

To add to the embarrassment, Samata spokesman Shambu Srivastava quit in a huff and joined the Congress. A former confidant, he alleged the defence minister was "playing the RSS game".

So, where does he go from here? Barring the first election he won from Mumbai in '67, Bihar has been his adopted state. He won the next eight elections from different constituencies in Bihar, cashing in on the state's history of "socialist movements" spanning the periods of JP, Acharya Narendra Dev, Karpoori Thakur and others. He won the last two elections from Nalanda, central Bihar, where Nitish has a huge support base. Party sources admit it would be difficult for Fernandes to return to Bihar.

It has been hard for him, ever since Tehelka. He was forced to quit as defence minister when his party president, Jaya Jaitly, was caught on camera "accepting bribes" in a dubious defence deal. Fernandes had later said that he won't accept a ministerial job unless he is absolved by the Venkataswamy Commission probing the scam. But he was reinstated, amid massive protests, with the Opposition inserting an unprecedented caveat in parliamentary proceedings: George Fernandes won't be allowed to speak on the floor of the House and will be boycotted until he is cleared of the charges.

Since then, every time he has risen to make a point in the Lok Sabha, Congress members—led most often by Mani Shankar Aiyer—have waved wads of 100 rupee notes at him. For a man who once used to campaign for probity in public life, nothing could be more humiliating.

Says Congress' Jaipal Reddy: "His reinstatement is without precedent. No tainted minister in Indian history has returned to the Union cabinet without being cleared. Fernandes announced in the wake of Tehelka that he would not return until he was cleared. What happened to that promise?" He adds, "I'd personally given notices to the government, under rule 184, to debate Tehelka more than a year ago. They have refused to do so saying they wanted Fernandes' name excluded from the motion." cpi(m) politburo member Prakash Karat holds similar views: "As far as we're concerned, his reinstatement on a highly sensitive issue is criminal. He shouldn't have been brought back through the backdoor."

All this has compelled the old 'socialist' to make his changed partisanship apparent. After the Gujarat carnage, Fernandes looked the other way while the Hindutva brigade went berserk.

Last fortnight, Fernandes got a minor reprieve when two Congress MPs, Lakshman Singh and Jagmeet Singh Brar, sat through a calling attention motion on the spate of MiG crashes.It created a ruckus and the two Congressmen were quick to apologise. Says a George confidant: "There are a number of Congress members who approach us privately." For a public person, that's just not good enough.