Hers was a life lived in the fringes — in the shadows of the spotlight that never left Leila Kabir. On Thursday evening, the 88-year-old, wife of the late firebrand socialist leader George Fernandes and daughter of Humayun Kabir who served in the Cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, passed away at her New Delhi residence. She had been battling cancer for two years, and decided towards the end that she did not want to be hospitalised.
Sean, the only son of Leila and Fernandes, an investment banker who is settled in the US and flew down hours earlier, was with her when she died.
With that ended the story of a couple whose heady courtship evolved into a strained relationship that defied easy definitions. When Fernandes died in January 2019, after a long illness, Leila was by his side, caring for him.
It was a life with elements of Greek tragedy. And yet, till the end, she did not lose the quintessential Leila — born into privilege, but always taking up public causes.
I used to meet her in the Seventies in Delhi, when she had come back from Oxford and joined the Red Cross sometime in 1970-71. My early memory of her is of a highly articulate, passionate woman with thick framed spectacles, short hair, sari-clad, speaking persuasively of the causes she was committed to.
From July 1971, when she married Fernandes in those heady days before the formation of Bangladesh – he a rising politician, she an officer with the Red Cross – her life came to be marked by tumult and upheaval. She used to say that the Bangladesh freedom struggle brought them together. She and Fernandes had had their first long conversation on a flight from Calcutta (as Kolkata was then known) to Delhi. Recognising her from their perfunctory meetings, with both being part of the circle around Ram Manohar Lohia, Fernandes changed his seat to sit next to Leila. At the end of that flight, came a dinner invitation; and a marriage proposal three weeks later.
They got married on July 22, 1971, and Sean, named ‘Sushanto Kabir Fernandes’ by them, was born on January 10, 1974.
They were all holidaying together at Gopalpur by the sea in Orissa on June 25, 1975, when Fernandes was tipped off about the declaration of the Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He knew it was a matter of hours before police came for him. He went underground, moving from one location to another for a year, till he was arrested.
He and Leila were to meet only 22 months later, after the Emergency ended. Soon after he went underground, she had left for the US with son Sean and spent months lobbying against the Emergency. She was apprehensive that “they” might kill Fernandes.
Friends recall Leila meeting leading newspaper editors in the US, addressing meetings – her speeches made to the Indian community arranged by a group called “Indians For Democracy”, who also looked after the young mother and son. She would brace herself for the tough questions she had to sometimes face about the Baroda dynamite case in which Fernandes had been booked.
Another group that provided Leila invaluable help was the Europe-based Socialist International.
After her return to India, and the formation of a government by the Janata Party, which had routed the Indira-led Congress, Leila found herself confronted with a very different situation. Fernandes had contested the 1977 elections from jail, won and become the Minister for Industry.
Hundreds of people would now be at their home at all hours to meet Fernandes, who kept an “open house”. There were endless cups of tea to be organised. Leila once told me: “What I find most difficult is when scores of people walk into our bedroom at 6 in the morning and don’t think there is anything unusual about it.”
By 1979, the Janata Party was being pulled asunder on the issue of “dual membership” of leaders of its constituent parties. The Socialists led by Madhu Limaye attacked the erstwhile Jana Sangh members for not severing their ties with the RSS despite merging their identity in the Janata Party headed by Morarji Desai. During this time, Fernandes made an impassioned speech in Parliament in defence of the Morarji Desai government, but two days later, did a complete turnaround to side with the Socialists to bring down the government.
I went to see Leila around this time, and found her agitated. “I don’t understand what hold Madhu Limaye has on George,” she fretted. The Janata Party government eventually collapsed not long after.
When Leila made up her mind to walk out of her marriage, the backdrop was again larger than life. It was October 31, 1984, the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, with Delhi plunged in violence and turmoil.
They would remain estranged for 25 years, but Leila never spoke ill of Fernandes in public. Even when they were not together, she once went to campaign for him in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, at his request.
Fernandes had his stint with power next in 1989, when V P Singh-led Janata Dal formed the government, after defeating the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress. Leila went to watch the swearing-in ceremony with friends at their home. They recalled her restlessness: “She kept talking about the ministries where Fernandes would do well and hoped he would get one of them.”
As it turned out, Fernandes got Railways – a ministry that over the years came to acquire an importance all its own. It was sweet irony for Fernandes who, in 1974, had led a railway strike that virtually brought the country to a halt, rattled Indira Gandhi and eventually led to the Emergency.
Despite their estrangement, Fernandes never sought a divorce from Leila, though she offered it. In 2009, their son Sean came from the US to stay with him at his official residence, and realised that Fernandes was ailing, with Alzheimer’s setting in, causing him to lose his memory.
It was soon after that that Leila determinedly moved into the picture again, showing a steely side – taking charge of Fernandes, and barring his brothers and friend Jaya Jaitly access to him. For the next decade or so, Leila took care of Fernandes, till he died in 2019.
On Friday, among those who came to offer their tributes to Leila were leaders from the JD(U), the party Fernandes spent his final few political years in. Aneel Prasad Hegde, who attended the cremation on behalf of Bihar Chief Minister and long-time Fernandes colleague Nitish Kumar, spoke about Leila and Fernandes’s time together in Odisha when the Emergency was imposed.
JD(U) national secretary Mohammad Nisar, who also attended the cremation, recalled her social work “in the field of health and education”. Dr Sunilam of the Kisan Sangharsh Samiti said: “I first met Leila when I came to Delhi for my PhD… and later ran into her from time to time as Fernandes’s wife.”
The daughter of Humayun Kabir, distinguished educationist, writer and minister in the Nehru government, Leila in one way embodied the secular ideal and promise of India held by those early nationalist leaders.
She told The Indian Express once, while Fernandes was ill and in her care, that she had resolved not to marry a Muslim or a Hindu. “The memories of Partition were still raw. My father was Muslim and my mother belonged to the Brahmo Samaj. I was neither this, nor that.”
Fernandes had trained to be a priest, rebelled, and jumped into socialism. By the time he met Leila, he was a Christian who saw Jesus as a “radical socialist”. So there she was, the daughter of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, married to a Christian who, for all the ups and downs of her life, continued to believe in giving back to the country.
Her biggest disappointment was Fernandes’s turn towards the BJP as the JD(U) formed an alliance with the party.
Still, she could barely hold a grudge against him. Every time he has a health crisis, Leila told The Indian Express, “George calls for me”.
Till he could, he would also call on her every year on her birthday.
With inputs by Lalmani Verma
