Mumbai: ‘Striking’ George Fernandes referred not just to his features but to the series of strikes the feisty trade union leader called for in the seventies, the most notable one being the 20-day All-India railway strike of 1974 when he was President of All India Railwaymen’s Federation, with many other unions and organisations supporting him.
Though his Mangalore-based middle-class family dreamt of him becoming a priest at a seminary there, Fernandes was lured by another call — that of public service — and plunged headlong into the Socialist Movement and trade unionism that was ideologically fashionable when the country had just attained Independence a couple of years earlier.
At 19, he came to Bombay (Mumbai), seeking employment, just like the millions of people who continue to do so even today. He spent many a night on the streets, fighting roaches and rodents, but never complaining, old-timers reminisce.
The polyglot went on to work as a proof-reader in a newspaper and entered into unionism, influenced by Placid D’Mello and later Ram Manohar Lohiya, battling for workers’ rights, taximen, government employees, often with opposing forces like the upcoming Shiv Sena wooing the locals with its ‘sons of the soil’ campaign. The externment of union leader Placid D’Mello from Mumbai got Fernandes into the labour movement, said Ranga Raichure, a long-time friend.
“Thanks to the externment notice, D’Mello brought Fernandes, whom he knew as a sharp and intelligent boy, into the union. George was living on the footpath then,” Raichure said. Fernandes stood up for the workers of the civic body, BEST (Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport) undertaking and gumasta workers and fought for their rights. He made a name for himself among the labour class in the 1960s, Reddy said.
“Congress leader S K Patil was a very powerful leader. He was invincible. George said Patil could be defeated and decided to contest against him. He got the backing of the labour,” the CPI leader recalled. Fernandes’ win against S K Patil in the 1967 elections earned him the sobriquet ‘George the giant-killer’. During the Sanyukta Maharashtra movement in 1950s and 1960s, the mood of people in Mumbai was anti-Congress since the party was perceived to be against the inclusion of Bombay into the state of Maharashtra.
Before contesting the 1967 Lok Sabha poll, Fernandes had led a successful municipal workers’ strike in Mumbai, Reddy mentioned. Interestingly, it was Fernandes who demanded that daily functioning of the Mumbai municipal corporation be carried out in Marathi and not in English, Raichure said.
Fernandes had also shared a close relationship with Shiv Sena supremo late Bal Thackeray. He was among the very few to call the Sena patriarch ‘Bal’, senior journalist Yogesh Trivedi remembered. It was Fernandes who started a cooperative society for taximen when one of the union members was denied loan by a bank, reminisced film artist Jayant Dharmadhikari.
