A firebrand before the word became commonplace, Fernandes lit many fires and never allowed the one that smouldered inside him to go out until Alzheimer’s confined him to bed. Dispatched to a religious seminary by his Mangalore-based middle class parents who wanted him to be trained as a Catholic priest, Fernandes, ‘George Saheb’ to legions of his admirers across the country, ran away to Bombay. All of 19, he slept on footpaths before finding a mentor in Placid D’Mello, whose Socialist leanings were to prove a life-long influence on the young boy from coastal Karnataka.
Fernandes soon found a job, that of a proofreader with the Times of India, a huge opening for the runaway kid, But the lure of Socialist ideology, its pull multiplied by the growing appeal of Ram Manohar Lohia and his feisty challenge to Congress and the Establishment, ensured it was the first and last job he held.
He plunged himself into the labour movement and started working among taxi drivers, turning Bombay Taxi Union into a formidable force. This was the time when the commercial capital was dominated by the likes of D'Mello, CPI boss S A Dange and his colleague Krishna Desai and, above all, Congress's S K Patil, "the uncrowned king of Bombay”. With his relentless energy, fearlessness and commitment to the working class, Fernandes was soon holding his own against his better-known peers. He surpassed them when he pulled off the unthinkable. A big victory over Patil from South Mumbai in the 1967 Lok Sabha polls — a feat made possible by an audacious and uniquely slick campaign which made him popular far beyond Bombay as the "giant killer".
The achievement was nearly dwarfed when he organised a countrywide railway strike in 1974 under the banner of All India Railwaymen's Federation. The strike lasted 20 days and virtually paralysed the rail network. Interestingly, it did not cost Fernandes and his fellow strikers goodwill among people who had turned sullen against the Indira Gandhi-led government. Indeed, Fernandes's circle now included Nusli Wadia and other industrialists as well as Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, known for his strike-breaking skills.
Indira responded to the rising groundswell of anger by suspending democracy and fundamental rights and jailing almost the entire opposition in June 1975. Fernandes, true to his reputation as a man of action, escaped the dragnet. He was soon plotting violent resistance against the Emergency and set out to procure dynamite sticks to set off explosions near the venue of Indira's rallies.
The ‘Baroda Dynamite Case’ also allegedly involved a plan to loot a train ferrying arms from Pimpri to Bombay. The plan failed to take off and Fernandes was finally arrested in June 1976.
He was in jail when Indira, misreading the popular mood, called elections in January 1977. He did not want to contest but was persuaded by colleagues, including former PM Morarji Desai, to enter the fray from Muzaffarpur in Bihar.
It was a new terrain for Fernandes who was not allowed to come out of jail. His campaigners went around with cutouts of Fernandes in handcuffs and that proved to be enough to earn him a record win.
Fernandes turned down the offer of a ministry in the Janata Party government, relenting only when a mob of angry supporters surrounded him, threatening violent persuasion if he did not agree. He took over as industries minister but the agitationist in him remained undimmed. He led a huge mob to gherao Rashtrapati Bhavan when the then acting president B D Jatti dithered over the dismissal of Congress governments in the north where the party had been routed.
But his stint came to be remembered for the marching orders he gave to US multinationals IBM and Coca-Cola.
It was a chaotic spell with Fernandes often struggling to navigate the tensions which racked and, eventually, marked the end of the Janata experiment. The tumult also saw Fernandes performing extraordinary calisthenics on the floor of Lok Sabha. He defended the Desai government in a valiant, marathon speech only to rail against the former PM the next day.
Defeat in Lok Sabha polls took Fernandes away from Parliament and into grassroots activism. The polyglot who spoke 10 languages criss-crossed the country to support the mutinies which raged unabated. He would host an assorted range of activists, even insurgents from Myanmar, at his Delhi residence. Later, he would do away with the gates to his official residence.
The exertions ensured that his popularity remained intact among the anti-Congress constituency and helped him play a crucial role in the formation of Janata Dal. It was Fernandes who persuaded a reluctant Mulayam Singh Yadav to suspend his reservations against V P Singh and join the party.
He was critical also of the National Front experiment where a centrist Janata Dal government was supported by BJP and Left from outside.
Fernandes declined the offer to be railway minister because of his earlier avatar as the leader of rail workers. It took V P Singh and others three days to persuade him and the result was the engineering marvel of Konkan Railway.
He broke away from Janata Dal after Lalu Yadav's chokehold had turned the party into a family fief. He, along with Bihar CM Nitish Kumar, launched Samta Party. The disastrous debut of the party failed to faze Fernandes as he, defying accusations of betrayal and opportunism by "secular" colleagues and opponents, forged a strong alliance with BJP, setting the stage for the formation of Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA.