In 2001, former Karnataka Chief Minister SM Krishna, asked Nafees Fazal to resign as a minister following reports that she was dancing at a party in Hotel West End. Fazal says it was a party hosted by Congress MLA Dinesh Gundu Rao, which SM Krishna too attended but left early. The next morning, Krishna's close associate RT Narayan, complained to him that she had been drinking and dancing at the party. “It was a blatant lie as everyone knew as per the Congress party's diktat, I never drink alcohol in public. As for dancing, it depends on what you consider as dancing. I recall standing with my friends and tapping my feet and occasionally shrugging my shoulders to the beat of a song,” she explains in the book.
Controversies have always shadowed Karnataka Congress politician Nafees Fazal's personal and political life. The former minister’s recently released autobiography Breaking Barriers, co-authored by Sandhya Mendonca, gives a glimpse of her life and the challenges she faced and how she confronted them. Recalling the incident while releasing her book on November 4, Krishna admitted that he took a hasty decision in asking for her resignation. “After I sought her resignation, I was taken to task by my wife Prema and also Fazal for not trying to find out the actual picture. She was only tapping her feet, which I also do with my fingers, when I attend music concerts,” he said. Though Krishna took back her resignation, her portfolio was changed from Medical Education to Science and Technology.
In 1983, she was given the Congress ticket to contest from the Shivajinagar ward for the Bengaluru City Corporation (now Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike). It was a ward reserved for women and her Janata Party rival was a school teacher Mumtaz Begum. The electorate included wrestlers, gymkhana horse owners and butchers. Fazal’s entry into the ward elicited immediate reactions from the voters, who excitedly commented, “Bhabhi (sister-in-law) you are wearing slippers made of gold!”
“That was the level of literacy among the voters, who mistook my leather gold colour footwear to be of genuine gold,” says Fazal. The ruling Janata Party candidate won, but the slander campaign unleashed against Fazal that “she smokes, goes to clubs in the mornings, plays cards in the afternoons and drinks in the evenings” stuck all through her life.
Nafees Fazal shot into limelight in 1984, when a 25-year-old youth Sayed Umar alias Munna, died in police custody at the Shivajinagar police station. She was walking with the local people on Broadway road in Shivajinagar to claim Munna’s body, when an altercation between the police and the crowd led to lathi-charge. She was taken into custody by the police for reportedly trying to incite the public and lodged in a remand home in the company of dancing girls. The staff had to put up with her hysterics as she wept and threatened to swallow her diamond ring if not released on bail.
Entering politics at the age of 31 years in 1979, she was the antithesis of a woman in public life to many politicians. In shimmering georgette and chiffon sarees, a glamorous woman hailing from a wealthy family did not go down well with some Muslim leaders. Muslim men, she says in the book, are “the biggest MCPs (male chauvinist pigs) and my opinion was reinforced in politics.”
According to Nafees Fazal, it was the abusive atmosphere in her family that turned her into a rebel. She blames her father who owned arecanut plantations in Mettupalyam in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, saying he was well educated, having studied at the Aligarh Muslim university but was a philanderer. “Plantations don't require round the year supervision. When the season was over, off went Daddy on his philandering jaunts. We could not see him for months and would now and then hear of his outings with some woman or the other. He lavished money on his girlfriends, but kept mother on a tight budget and was a wife beater.”
To escape the trauma at home, Fazal says she would escape to her maternal grandparents’ house in Chennai, where her grandfather was the Sheriff of Madras. However, there too she had to witness her grandfather who doted on her, physically and verbally abuse his wife.
When she was seven years old, her father decided to put her in a boarding school in Ooty as he felt she was getting spoiled by the grandparents. “As my parents drove away from the school, Ameen (her younger brother) and I ran after them holding on to the Fiat car's bumper desperately. Mummy was devastated from the parting. Unable to control anything that was happening around me and to me, I began to rebel against everything,” she says. The autobiography also recalls an uncle molesting her, when she was young. “I did not know how to handle the situation and did not tell anybody. But it added to my mistrust of men and I still carry residual anger against them,” she adds.
Just out of high school, Fazal met Hassan, whose family owned clothing store Fazal's in Commercial Street in Bengaluru. According to Fazal, Hassan began wooing in typical filmi style by following her in his Lambretta scooter. Finally, she acceded, but laid out three conditions: that he should take her out dancing at the Catholic Club, eat Chinese food and allow her to join politics. Married at the age of 17 to Hassan, who was five years older to her, Fazal says, “I had to deal with a rolling pin-wielding mother-in-law who treated me like a maid. I was made to fill buckets of water at dawn, slice 30 onions in a day and clean the dog's kennel.”
Fazal reveals many have asked her whether there is a casting couch in politics. She has always retorted asking why politics would be different from any other field. Once she is said to have asked RK Dhawan – her friend and political secretary to former PM Indira Gandhi – whether her refusal to play ‘bedroom politics’ was the reason she was not getting a break in politics ever after 14 years. Dhawan cautioned her saying there was no turning back from such a path (bedroom politics). “They will pass you around till you become a whore,” Fazal quotes Dhawan as saying.
She has no qualms admitting that smoking cigarettes with Dhawan was the bond they shared. There was this suited and booted person sitting and smoking Dunhill cigarettes. “I commented, “aap kitne lucky hain” (you are so lucky) and he asked what I meant. I pointed to the cigarettes, and he promptly offered me one. In fact, smoking bonded us and he would call me Sweetie,” Fazal says.
The son of a trustee of a reputed medical college wanted to push a deal through her for the purchase of medical equipment for a government hospital from a foreign company. When she rejected the deal, a hefty bribe was offered to her, but she refused to budge. The trustee approached RT Narayan accusing Fazal of seeking a bribe, who informed the CM. “I was asked whether I took a Rs 30 lakh bribe. I told Krishna that my mathematics was not that bad. When I was offered Rs 3 crore, why would I want to take Rs 30 lakh?”
The book mentions the surprise visits she undertook as Medical Education Minister in Victoria and Bowring and Lady Curzon hospitals, her tenure as MLC and being denied an Assembly ticket from Vijayapura in the 2013 Assembly polls. She speaks highly of her political mentor, former Governor Margaret Alva. She also details the backroom work done by KPCC President DK Shivakumar and her to make Krishna the state unit chief in 1999, for which she says AICC President Mallikarjun M Kharge has never forgiven her. Krishna replaced Kharge's close friend N Dharam Singh then.
Fazal, who has not been very active in politics in recent years, says her political life began with Indira Gandhi and ended with Rahul Gandhi. Though she says she admires Rahul for reducing corruption in the organisation, she also says he treated her harshly without cause in 2016. She resigned from the Congress in 2017 as the party did not take a stand on the instant triple talaq and Rahul's humiliation, when she approached him to be re-nominated as an MLC. She rejoined the party during Dinesh Gundu Rao's tenure as KPCC President and is expected to take an active role once again in the coming days.