Leila Kabir Fernandes, the wife of the firebrand trade unionist and a top socialist leader George Fernandes, was at a total loss after her husband had vanished from Gopalpur-on-sea in Orissa, immediately after the Emergency was declared. The couple were holidaying with Sushanto, their toddler son, at Leila’s family home when George had to leave to avoid arrest. He had not always been present and available in the marriage and the Emergency had forced a new, yet familiar loneliness on Leila. George went underground and remained undiscovered for nearly a year. When he was betrayed and finally caught, and was in a solitary cell at the Hissar prison, he reflected that the longest period he had spent with his wife, “uninterruptedly”, was during the four months in 1972, when they toured the US and Canada, meeting friends and extended family.
When Leila returned to “ominous” Delhi after George had escaped, she realised that the only option left for her was to leave India. She feared that if she stayed back, they would imprison her and that would leave their son alone. Her husband was a high-value target; he was to become the “most-hunted man” in India’s democratic history, and hence her fears and premonitions at the very start were not out of place. She did not want herself and her son to be made emotional pawns in a ruthless regime.
Leila left India “unnoticed” and managed to reach her brother in Charlottesville, Virginia. She instantly became part of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) and the democracy work they were engaged in. She made contact with US trade unions. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) had already expressed solidarity with IFD and that made her job easy. A few months after she reached the US, Leila’s passport was impounded. According to Fernandes’ biographer, Leila was not happy about George going underground “seemingly unconcerned” about her and their toddler. George and Leila had married four years ago, in 1971, and Indira Gandhi had attended their wedding reception at the India International Centre in New Delhi. A Quaker couple had pronounced them husband and wife in Hindi. It had never been an easy marriage between the two. In fact, it was in the US that Subramanian Swamy had spoken to Leila about George’s infidelity.
While Leila was in the US, George was arrested in Calcutta on 10 June 1976. The IFD newsletter said it was a “culmination of a yearlong manhunt, one of the most massive ever launched in India.” While underground, he had published newsletters, “copies of which were duly mailed to Mrs Gandhi”. George was accused of “selective sabotage” as part of the resistance to the regime. Some of his closest associates in the underground had already been arrested, in March 1976, in what had come to be known as the Baroda Dynamite Case. The newsletter also said that it had reliably learnt that one of those arrested in the case, CGK Reddy, had been “brutally beaten and tortured” in custody, in an effort to get him to reveal the whereabouts of George. It further revealed that a communication, dated 10 June, from Bombay, had informed IFD that George’s brother Lawrence Fernandes had similarly been tortured for twenty days in a Bangalore lock-up from 1 May 1976.
Given this history of torture, Leila was obviously concerned for George’s safety in custody when the arrest was announced. She addressed a press conference in Washington DC and said that her husband would “become a victim of personal vendetta”. IFD stood by her and did a telegram campaign, urging Indira Gandhi to apply utmost restraint and fairness in the treatment of George. They also asked for an open trial. IFD ensured that Eugene McCarthy, the independent presidential candidate at the time, and former democratic senator from Minnesota, also sent a telegram. Leila and IFD swiftly got Hans Janitschek, the secretary general of the Socialist International, based in London, to put out an appeal for the release of George. In his statement, Janitscheck said he had reason to believe that George’s life was in danger. Soon, top European leaders, Willy Brandt, former German Chancellor and Nobel laureate, Olaf Palme, the Swedish prime minister, and Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian Chancellor, sent a cable to Indira Gandhi asking her to intervene personally to “safeguard the physical well-being” of George. The International Transport Workers’ Federation, to which the All India Railwaymen’s Federation headed by George was affiliated, went a step ahead and warned that if anything happened to George in police custody, they would “most probably respond by organising an international boycott of Indian ships and aircraft.” The phrase “most probably” made their draft curious, uncertain and to a cynical eye, an unimplementable threat, but still it was a big statement that carried in it a large-hearted solidarity.
Leila also wrote to the home ministry in India, seeking details about her husband’s arrest and condition. The home ministry wrote to her in a curt fashion, “How can you not be aware of the activities of your husband who has for the past months been moving about instigating people to commit acts of violence, subversion, sabotage and other serious crimes prejudicial to public order and security of the country.” They also informed that he had been arrested on 10 June in Calcutta and was in legal custody, and his health was just fine. In this response, they added that allegations of custodial torture of Lawrence Fernandes, George’s brother, was “totally false, baseless and mischievous.”
The clarification about Lawrence Fernandes was because the 65-year-old Alice Fernandes, George’s mother, had written a long letter to the President of India, a couple of weeks before George was arrested. The letter, which gave a heart-wrenching graphic account of Lawrence Fernandes’s physical condition, after being taken away by the police, was reprinted in Indian Opinion, the IFD newsletter. The letter was actually about her three sons – Lawrence, Michael and of course, George. Michael, her third son, had been in jail, without trial, under MISA, since December 1975. Lawrence, her second son, had been picked up from their Bangalore home on 1 May 1976, under the pretext of finding out about Michael’s habeas corpus petition in the Karnataka High Court. But he was tortured in custody, seeking the whereabouts of George, her eldest son.
Alice wrote,
[The police] in a most inhuman, reckless and ruthless manner to third degree methods of physical torture … Besides beating him with clubs (until five of them were broken to pieces) they used a banyan tree root to clout him with and booted him and slapped him … [they threatened] he would be thrown on the railway tracks and killed under a moving train leaving no evidence of their hand in his death.
On 20 May 1976, when she went to see him, Alice said,
I found him looking dead. He was unable to move except without two persons helping him about, and then too with great pain and limping. His left side is without use as if crippled, and both his left leg and hand are still swollen. He is in a mentally and physically wrecked condition and is unable to talk freely without faltering. He is terribly nervous and mortally afraid of police, of anyone in khaki uniform, of the approaching sound of anyone walking with shoes on, or of any other person, all of whom he fears to be interrogators and tormentors. He looks completely haggard and he has lost twenty kilos during these twenty days.
Alice then mocked what had happened in the Supreme Court.
…When the Supreme Court judgement of April 28 in the Habeas Corpus petitions case insists that no instances of misuse of executive power have come to the notice of the Supreme Court, etc., am I to believe that the torture of [my] son is a humane act on behalf of the Government? Or am I to believe that all this is part of some deliberate, diabolical design against my family? Are my two sons being held hostages for George Fernandes whose present whereabouts or condition my entire family is totally unaware of? Is it moral or right that my family should be so harassed and tormented for the political views held by my son George Fernandes?
Finally, Alice cursed, “I am sure if I don’t get justice from you, the Almighty God who is above all the almighty persons on this earth will punish the wrong doers or that Nemesis will take its toll sooner or later.”
After the arrest of George, Leila remained tense. She told Indian Opinion that, in spite of repeated letters and cables to Indira Gandhi and the home ministry, she had not received any official information of her husband’s condition. She had also learnt that George’s lawyer had not been able to see him after his first and only appearance in court. She said, even the government prosecutor “became embarrassed” that George’s whereabouts were not revealed. Before George’s arrest, his whereabouts were not known, now they were not revealed. “The situation is very unnerving and causing me great distress,” Leila had confessed.
Mavis Sigwalt (co-founder of the IFD) shared an interesting episode about Leila during the stressful days. Leila was in Chicago for a meeting and left her child with Mavis, only to be angry later. This is what happened:
Mavis recalled:
Since she was going for the meeting somebody had to look after the child, and since I had a child of almost the same age, it was understood that the child could stay back with me. But after she left for the meeting, I got a call from office that my boss had fallen in her apartment and had been admitted to the hospital. She had no support and no family. People who were her closest were the people who worked with her. I had to go and attend to her urgently. Therefore, I left my child and Leila’s child with our babysitter. But when Leila returned, she was not very happy about what I had done, although both the kids were well taken care of. It is not that I had double standards, I left my child behind too. But her unhappiness was registered in my memory.
While Leila was only a passing acquaintance to Mavis and SR, they really got to know Ram Jethmalani well. He stayed with them whenever he visited Chicago during the Emergency era, and from their recollection, he was a pleasant and jovial person. “He stayed with us five or six times and we got to really know him. He was a great storyteller and was very funny. He could see humour in all the craziness that was going on. I learnt a lot from him,” Mavis said.
The other itinerant, Subramanian Swamy, did not stay at Mavis and SR’s residence but had dinner with them a couple of times. Like with Leila, that relationship, too, did not seem to blossom into a friendship for the couple.
Mavis recalled:
Our house was a kind of centre for people to come together. I was very open to people coming home and staying with us or sharing a meal. I would often put a vegetarian Indian meal on the table, and since my chapatti-making skills were poor, I made good poories. Anybody who came to my home would perhaps remember my poories. .
There was a regular stream of people visiting them in connection with IFD during the Emergency. It was a standard joke in Mavis’s office to count how many people would turn up for dinner each day, at short notice. Mavis, at the time, was working in Illinois’ department of ageing. The funniest visitor story that Mavis narrated was about Ravi, who became the couple’s lifelong friend. During one of his visits, Mavis recalled that Ravi had messed up her laundry. “He put his green shirt with the load of my white clothes, and I had green clothes for months,” Mavis laughed as she recalled.
In an embarrassing case, something that IFD leaders mentioned in a hushed tone, a certain person travelling from India for the anti-emergency cause demonstrated traits of pilfering. He stole small denomination dollar bills left on the mantelshelf in the house he was put up, much to the disappointment of his host in New York. This did not push them to judge him harshly. They continued their relationship with the person even years after this discovery. Except, they stopped keeping dollar bills on the mantel when he came visiting.
Besides all the serious political talk and building a resistance strategy that was taking place within IFD, amidst all the gloom and despair, there was also food, travel, laughter, losses, victories, disappointments, generosity, friendships, marriages, mix-ups and misunderstandings. There was a capacious understanding and equanimity in IFD leaders about human situations that sprang up, unlike what was being reported from India, where the effort was to only generate fear and instil discipline.
The Emergency and IFD brought people together. There were serious acquaintances and lifelong friendships that began at the time. There was also an in-between category of limited-edition friendships – of people who grew thick during the Emergency and then drifted apart when their common purpose and pursuit evaporated. But all those who met during that extraordinary phase had, by default, dropped a pin about each other in the vast spread of their mental maps. The place where those pins fell and remained, over the decades, became locators of a trough of special and specific memories.
Excerpted with permission from The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship, Sugata Srinivasaraju, Penguin India.
