George: An Unguided Missile Inducted By Fire

That pacifist who kept Tibetan refugees and Burmese spies in his home?

- R. Prasannan

That was how many of us on the military beat reacted when A.B. Vajpayee ‘inducted’ George Fernandes as his defence minister in 1998. He will slash the defence budget and, given his sympathy for the Burmese rebels, may reverse the previous three regimes’ outreach to Myanmar, we concluded.

George had had a stormy petrel reputation—the socialist who had humbled Indira Gandhi’s fund-raiser S.K. Patil in his South Bombay redoubt; brought every train to halt in the great Indian Railways strike; had gone to jail for plotting to dynamite the rail tracks and offices in Baroda; won the 1977 Emergency polls from jail with a brute majority; used to self-drive his rickety Fiat to office as minister in the Janata government; had kicked out giants Coca-Cola and IBM from India; had travelled in the guard’s cabin of a goods train to reach a public event on time; had performed the most shameful Aaya Ram-Gaya Ram feat when he defected to Charan Singh minutes after putting up a stellar defence of the Morarji Desai government in a no-confidence motion; had given the blushes to every ace lawyer in India with his brilliant debate in the Lok Sabha over the impeachment of Justice Ramaswamy; and had links with every rebel with or without a cause. He would prove to be a thorn on the Vajpayee regime’s side, we thought.

At his first presser two days after the ‘induction’, we grilled the pacifist on every matter military. My! the man answered as if he had been born in a uniform. Then a question was thrown: “What is the status of Prithvi [missile]?”

“Prithvi? I am told they have been deployed near Jalandhar.”

Our eyes popped out. We looked at each other. Mantriji had blurted out what was then (no longer) a secret; but who will bell the cat? Knowing his temper, no officer would.