George Fernandes: Diehard socialist and a complex bundle of contradictions

It is a cliche but some cliches bear repetition. With the death of George Fernandes, an era has come to an end

Socialist, trade unionist, and bitter critic of the Congress, Fernandes was, to those who didn’t know him, a complex bundle of complex contradictions. He began life in Mangalore in a – relatively – middle-class Catholic family, and if life had led him where it wanted him to go, he would have become a priest. But being George Fernandes, he fought traditional trajectories. He got associated with the Socialist movement which itself was going through a trauma. Stalin’s excesses and the resistance in Poland and Czechoslovakia had fired the Socialist imagination – Fernandes’s too. At home, India’s resounding defeat in the