Fierce & principled, Leila Kabir stood with George Fernandes & stood alone just as strong

Kabir, who died at age 88, was battling cancer. She is remembered by colleagues, friends & family as a fighter for justice, a political thinker & a person of remarkable mental fortitude.

File photo of Leila Kabir accepting the Padma Vibhushan to George Fernandes (Posthumous) for Public Affairs from then President Ram Nath Kovind | ANI

New Delhi: Social activist Leila Kabir, wife of late veteran socialist politician George Fernandes, died Thursday evening at her Delhi residence at the age of 88. Kabir, though, had begun preparations for her own funeral 2 years ago.

Everything had been decided—even the songs that she wanted played during the memorial. Everybody had a role to play, assigned to them by Kabir.

“A year and a half ago, she even had one of her friends go purchase a white kurta-pyjama for me. She told her friend that if my son is able to make it to my funeral, he should have something suitable to wear,” her son Sean Fernandes, who works in private equity in the US, said to ThePrint.

“That’s incredible strength of mind to have. Most people are in denial about their own mortality until it’s staring them in the face, but she was ready for it, she did not fear death,” he said.

Leila had been battling cancer for a few years.

This is exactly how people who knew Leila remembered her—fierce, passionate, principled and a force in her own right.

Leila was the daughter of Humayun Kabir, who served in the cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru. Her cousin, Altamas Kabir served as a Chief Justice of India between 2012 and 2013. And Leila Kabir was a presence to reckon with on her own.

In April 1971, both Fernandes and Leila boarded a flight that sealed their fate together. While their mutual friends had played matchmakers for the two of them earlier, it was this flight from Calcutta to Delhi that really brought the two of them together. Both were returning from their separate missions to East Pakistan, Leila recalled in a blog post on a website dedicated to Fernandes. Leila was working with the Indian Red Cross at the time.

They got married in July of 1971, and had a son in January 1974. While Fernandes and Leila separated in 1984, she returned in 2010 to care for Fernandes, who had developed Alzheimer’s by then.

The whistle

On the night of 25 June, 1975, at 10 pm—mere hours before then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency—Leila heard a whistle in their house. She knew her husband, George, had arrived.

“We had a signal between us, to alert us that we were coming. His was a whistle,” she said in an interview.

“It was completely by chance that George evaded arrest that night when Mrs Gandhi put just about every national leader in the opposition in jail on the night of 25-26 June. Because I had invited George to come visit me and our baby son and my mother,” she said. At the time, Leila was living with her mother in a coastal town of Gopalpur-on-Sea, close to Berhampur in Orissa.

The next morning, fishermen brought the news of the Emergency to their house.

Fernandes managed to escape imprisonment, and went underground. And Leila did not see him for the next 22 months.

Meanwhile, she managed to find a way out of the country for herself and her 1.5-year-old son, making her way to the US, to her brother’s house. She then travelled in the US as well as several European states, apprising people of the reality back home. She even deposed before the United States Senate Sub-Committee for International Relations, which was then holding special hearings on human rights violations in India.

‘She could raise slogans’

As the Railway Minister in 1990, Fernandes’s mind was racing with several challenges that his railway budget could present. His wife, Leila was one of them.

“He told me that there will be two women sitting in the gallery of the Parliament. At any time during the Railway Budget, they can raise slogans against the Budget and against me,” Chanchal, his political adviser at the time, recalled in a conversation with ThePrint. Fernandes was talking about Leila and political activist Pramila Dandavate.

There were no slogans that day, though. Leila was satisfied with the budget, Chanchal said.

“She would fight against any sort of injustice. It was a part of her nature,” Chanchal added. She was born into privilege, but her heart was always beating to take up public causes.

“We used to consider her to have a tall personality. She was a political intellectual, someone who had her own identity. She was someone we always remembered and spoke about very highly…In any debate, people would listen to her…George sahab would also respect everything she’d say,” Former Member of Parliament Raj Babbar said to ThePrint.

Away from the limelight

Kabir returned to Fernandes’ life in 2010 and spent years taking care of him.

Journalist and former politician Santosh Bhartiya recalled that Kabir came back to Fernandes when the latter was going through an extremely difficult time.

“At such a time, Leila ji stood beside him and took care of him like he was a toddler…Leila ji and George sahab’s relationship during his final days, she was helping him through everything, teaching him how to live again. And George sahab would listen to her too,” he said.

However, Kabir continued with her social work too.

For instance, amid the outpouring of love and support for Leila came a LinkedIn post by an NGO ‘Vidya India’, counting her as an “unsung hero”.

“There are some people who want to be in the limelight, and want to be recognised for everything they do. And then there are people who do so much behind the scenes that are never seen by the broader society. But the impact is maybe even greater than the person who’s making a lot of noise, and my mom was definitely in that category,” Sean said.

Fernandes passed away in January 2019. And according to Sean, Leila passed away in the same room in her Delhi house, 6 years later.

(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)