George Mathew Fernandes was an Indian trade unionist, statesman, and journalist, who served as the 22nd Defence Minister of India from 1998 until 2004.
74 Facts About George Fernandes
2.
George Fernandes was a member of Lok Sabha for over 30 years, starting from Bombay in 1967 till 2009 mostly representing constituencies from Bihar.
3.
George Fernandes was a key member of the Janata Dal and the founder of the Samata Party, now led by Uday Mandal its President.
4.
George Fernandes held several ministerial portfolios including communication, industry, railways, and defence.
5.
George Fernandes defeated S K Patil of the Indian National Congress in the 1967 parliamentary elections from the Bombay South constituency.
6.
George Fernandes organised the 1974 Railway strike, when he was President of the All India Railwaymen's Federation.
7.
In 1977, after the Emergency had been lifted, George Fernandes won the Muzaffarpur seat in Bihar in absentia and was appointed Union Minister for Industries.
8.
George Fernandes was the driving force behind the Konkan Railway project during his tenure as railway minister from 1989 to 1990.
9.
George Fernandes was a defence minister in the National Democratic Alliance Government, when the Kargil War broke out between India and Pakistan, and India conducted its nuclear tests at Pokhran.
10.
George Fernandes won nine Lok Sabha elections from 1967 to 2004.
11.
George Fernandes died on 29 January 2019 at the age of 88.
12.
George Fernandes was awarded the Padma Vibhushan India's second highest civilian award posthumously in 2020 in the field of Public Affairs.
13.
George Fernandes was born on 3 June 1930 to John Joseph Fernandes and Alice Martha Fernandes, in Mangalore to a Mangalorean Catholic family.
14.
George Fernandes's mother was a great admirer of King George V, hence she named her first son George.
15.
George Fernandes's father was employed by the Peerless Finance group as an insurance executive, and headed their office of South India for several years.
16.
George Fernandes attended his first few years of schooling at a government school near his house called "Board school", a municipal school and a church school.
17.
George Fernandes studied from fifth grade at the school attached to St Aloysius College, Mangalore, where he completed his Secondary School Leaving Certificate.
18.
George Fernandes's premise was that he did not want to become a lawyer and fight cases for his father who often evicted tenants from a patch of land that they owned on the outskirts of Mangalore.
19.
George Fernandes was instead enrolled in a seminary for studies to become a priest.
20.
George Fernandes went to St Peter's Seminary in Bangalore at the age of 16, to be trained as a Roman Catholic priest, studying philosophy for two and a half years from 1946 to 1948.
21.
George Fernandes began work at the age of 19, organising exploited workers in the road transport industry and in the hotels and restaurants in Mangalore.
22.
George Fernandes's first guru was a Mangalorean activist and a freedom fighter Ammembala Balappa.
23.
Balappa identified and groomed a young George Fernandes, who had taken refuge at places surrounding Nehru Maidan in Mangalore city, after being thrown out of the house.
24.
George Fernandes was associated with Ram Manohar Lohia lead Praja Socialist Party in its Mangalore division.
25.
George Fernandes later left to Bombay in 1950 and faced tremendous hardships.
26.
George Fernandes first contested Lok Sabha election in 1967 as a socialist, and defeated the Congress stalwart Sa Kaa Patil in Bombay in a famous upset, earning the sobriquet 'George the Giant-killer'.
27.
George Fernandes contested from Muzaffarpur, Bihar in 1977 while still in jail as a Jana Sangh candidate, and won.
28.
George Fernandes was made minister in the first non-Congress govt in India.
29.
George Fernandes lost a bye-poll from Banka in 1985 and again in 1986.
30.
George Fernandes went to the office of Socialist Party in Bombay and met Madhu Dandavate to ask him for staying there for some time but was not welcomed.
31.
George Fernandes's life was tough in Bombay, and he had to sleep on the streets, until he got a job as a proofreader for The Times of India newspaper.
32.
George Fernandes rose to prominence as a trade unionist and fought for the rights of labourers in small scale service industries such as hotels and restaurants.
33.
In 1951, George Fernandes joined Bombay Dock Worker's Union and worked to revive the publication of a newsletter The Dockman.
34.
George Fernandes served as a member of the Bombay Municipal Corporation from 1961 to 1968.
35.
George Fernandes won in the civic election in 1961 and, until 1968, continuously raised the problems of the exploited workers in the representative body of the metropolis.
36.
On 4 April 1963, George Fernandes was arrested along with Sardar Parsbag Singh and Janardhan Upadhyay under Defence of India act because of their demand to change the taxi fair structure.
37.
George Fernandes was offered a party ticket for the Bombay South constituency by the Samyukta Socialist Party against the more wellknown S K Patil of the Indian National Congress in Bombay.
38.
Nevertheless, Fernandes won by garnering 48.5 per cent of the votes, thus earning his nickname, "George the Giantkiller".
39.
George Fernandes emerged as a key leader in the upsurge of strike actions in Bombay during the second half of the 1960s but, by the beginnings of the 1970s, the impetus of his leadership had largely disappeared.
40.
George Fernandes attended a meeting of the Berhampur University Employees Association, a meeting with socialist leaders and workers and a gathering of intellectuals in the evening.
41.
George Fernandes wanted to rob a train used to carry weapons from Pimpri to Bombay.
42.
George Fernandes won the Muzaffarpur seat in Bihar by an over 300,000 vote margin in 1977 from jail where he was lodged in the Baroda dynamite case, despite his not even visiting the constituency.
43.
On 12 July 1979, speaking on Motion of no confidence brought by Yashwantrao Chavan, George Fernandes defended Morarji Desai's government.
44.
George Fernandes retained his Parliamentary seat from Muzaffarpur in 1980, and sat in the opposition.
45.
George Fernandes then decided to shift his base to Bihar in 1989, when an anti-Congress wave was sweeping the country in the wake of the Bofors scandal, and won Muzaffarpur in the 1989 and 1991 general elections, George Fernandes later joined the Janata Dal, a party which was formed from the Janata Party at Bangalore in August 1988.
46.
George Fernandes broke away from the erstwhile Janata Dal and formed the Samata Party in 1994, which became a key ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party which is the current form of the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
47.
In 2003, George Fernandes reunited with the Janata Dal, and merged his Samata Party with it.
48.
George Fernandes served as the Defence Minister of India in both the second and third National Democratic Alliance governments.
49.
However, George Fernandes refused to acknowledge the failure of intelligence agencies in detecting infiltration along Kargil sector.
50.
George Fernandes was involved in skirmishes with the then Chief of Naval Staff of the Indian Navy, Vishnu Bhagwat, over promotion of Vice-Admiral Harinder Singh as Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff.
51.
George Fernandes is the only defence minister of a nuclear power who had a picture of Hiroshima bombing in his office.
52.
George Fernandes made 18 visits to the icy heights of the 6,600 metres Siachen glacier in Kashmir, which holds the record of being "the world's highest battlefield".
53.
George Fernandes was known for overseeing a huge increase in India's defence budget as compared to the allocations made by previous governments.
54.
Later, political observers alleged that George Fernandes was locked in a bitter party rivalry with his one-time friend, Samata Party co-founder, Nitish Kumar.
55.
On 30 July 2009, George Fernandes filed his nomination as an independent candidate for the mid-term poll being held for the Rajya Sabha seat vacated by Janata Dal president Sharad Yadav.
56.
George Fernandes was a long time supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, an organisation which sought to create an independent state in the north and east of Sri Lanka.
57.
George Fernandes was a patron of the Fund Raising Committee backed by the LTTE, with an objective to help the 26 accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.
58.
George Fernandes revealed the infamous "Operation Leech" incident, which resulted in the capture of Arakan Army insurgents on one of India's islands in the Andaman Sea.
59.
George Fernandes fought for the welfare and release of anti-Burmese rebels held by the Indian Government.
60.
George Fernandes allegedly sought to obtain funding from the US Central Intelligence Agency and the French government to organise underground sabotage activities.
61.
George Fernandes' name figured prominently in Operation West End, a sting operation in which journalist Mathew Samuel, armed with hidden cameras, from a controversial investigative journal, Tehelka, posing as representatives of a fictitious arms company, appeared to bribe the Bharatiya Janata Party President, Bangaru Laxman, a senior officer in the Indian Army and Jaya Jaitly, the General Secretary of the Samata Party and George Fernandes' companion.
62.
The scandal caused uproar all over India and George Fernandes was forced to resign from his post as a Defence Minister.
63.
George Fernandes was cleared by the one man commission headed by retired Justice Phukan.
64.
George Fernandes later expressed regret for his statements, saying it was wrongly interpreted by the media.
65.
George Fernandes has criticised China for providing sophisticated weapons to Pakistan to build its missiles, and has rapped the Chinese for strengthening their military across the Himalayas in Tibet.
66.
George Fernandes was accused in the 2002 coffin scam, following allegations that 500 poor quality aluminium caskets were bought from the United States at rates 13 times more than the actual price, to transport the bodies of slain soldiers, after the Kargil War.
67.
George Fernandes was the editor of a Konkani language monthly Konkani Yuvak in 1949.
68.
George Fernandes was the editor of an English monthly, The Other Side, and the chairman of the editorial board of the Hindi monthly Pratipaksh.
69.
George Fernandes learnt Marathi and Urdu in jail, and Latin while he was in the seminary in his early youth.
70.
George Fernandes was reported to be suffering from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and in January 2010 was undergoing treatment at Baba Ramdev's ashram at Haridwar for the diseases at the request of Leila Kabir, who had recently returned to his life.
71.
In July 2010, the Delhi High Court ruled that George Fernandes would stay with Kabir and that George Fernandes' brothers would be able to visit.
72.
George Fernandes died at the age of 88 on 29 January 2019, in Delhi following a swine flu infection.
73.
Mr George Fernandes was a great humanitarian and believer in truth.
74.
George Fernandes never missed an opportunity to speak up for the Tibetan people as well as for others in similar situation.