Oscar Fernandes

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.
Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook
community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully
acknowledged in your name.

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

A brief biography

Vinobha KT, Sep 14, 2021: The Times of India

Former Union minister and sitting Rajya Sabha member Oscar Fernandes was a trusted loyalist of the Gandhi family.

For close to four decades, Fernandes was counted among the closest confidantes of the Gandhis, specifically AICC interim president Sonia Gandhi. Affable, soft-spoken and unflappable, Fernandes rose in the party ranks as an organisational man and was known to pull long working hours. Though his stint as minister in the UPA government was largely unremarkable, he was the right pick for trouble-shooting with the Congress leadership often nominating him to party panels or as pointsman for a change of guard in states.

He was perhaps the only other Karnataka-based politician, apart from BJP’s late H N Ananth Kumar, to enjoy a Delhi tenure and to become an integral part of the inner circle of a national party leadership at a young age.

Handpicked by Sanjay Gandhi, he later became parliamentary secretary to late PM Rajiv Gandhi, and worked with Sonia and Rahul as well. Always comfortable behind the scenes, Fernandes climbed the rungs during Rajiv’s time.

A five-time Lok Sabha MP from Udupi (1980-1996) and Rajya Sabha member for four terms (since 1998), Fernandes was inducted into UPA I under then PM Manmohan Singh. Besides labour and employment, he held portfolios of NRI affairs and statistics and programme implementation.

Recalling his political association with Fernandes, opposition leader in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said he was instrumental in implementing the Konkan railway project. ‘During the project implementation (in the 80s), there were a lot of issues related to land acquisition. As I was the revenue minister then, Oscar travelled to every village and convinced each farmer to part with their land. Since then, Oscar and I shared a bond.”