Forgotten ally?

Everyone who was around during the Emergency was felicitated by the National Democratic Alliance government on June 26 last year as well as this year - everyone except one man, who embodied the resistance to the Emergency: George Fernandes. In a powerful and poignant piece for a newspaper, Fernandes' colleague Jaya Jaitley asked why this was so. "George is fiercely against any form of self-aggrandisement. He hated the trend of huge cut-out figures of politicians that proliferated from the late 1980s," she wrote. "When a young tribal political worker from Madhya Pradesh wanted a huge sum of money to have cut-outs of his own image during an election campaign George refused and gave him a mouthful. The person switched to another party along with his wife. They could soon be seen with newly acquired gold jewellery." "He was a person who fought from the streets and pavements up to the point when he could call a total strike in Mumbai on the strength of a phone call, and to being a Union minister for communications, industry, railways, Kashmir affairs, and defence at different times, without money, family name, religious affiliation or caste to back him," she wrote. Fernandes is very ill at present.