A veteran socialist, he was a member of the Lok Sabha for over 30 years, starting from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in 1967 till 2009 mostly representing constituencies from Bihar.

As defence minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led second and third Atal Bihari Vajpayee ministries (1998–2004), he oversaw the outbreak of the Kargil War and the implementation of nuclear tests at Pokhran.

Balappa identified and groomed a young Fernandes, who had taken refuge at places surrounding Nehru Maidan in Mangalore city, after being thrown out of the house.

He first contested Lok Sabha election in 1967 as a socialist, and defeated the Congress stalwart Sa Kaa Patil in Bombay in a famous upset, earning the sobriquet 'George the Giant-killer'.

[36] On 4 April 1963, George was arrested along with Sardar Parsbag Singh and Janardhan Upadhyay under Defence of India act because of their demand to change the taxi fair structure.

An industrialist friend, Viren J. Shah, managing director of Mukand Ltd., helped them find contacts for procuring dynamite, used extensively in quarries around Halol (near Baroda).

[52] Fernandes won the Muzaffarpur seat in Bihar by an over 300,000 vote margin in 1977 from jail where he was lodged in the Baroda dynamite case,[53] despite his not even visiting the constituency.

[57][58][59] During his union ministership, he clashed with American multinationals IBM and Coca-Cola insisting they implement FERA, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which had been passed under Indira Gandhi's government.

[61][62] During his first tenure as MP, Fernandes set up a Doordarshan Kendra (1978), Kanti Thermal Power Station (1978) and the Lijjat papad factory to generate employment in Muzaffarpur.

In a debate preceding a vote of confidence two years into the government's tenure in 1979, he vehemently spoke out against the practice of permitting members to retain connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) while being in the ministry in the Janata Party.

The leaders of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, among them Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, refused to give up their allegiance with the RSS, leading to a split within the Janata Party.

The issue of "dual membership" caused Morarji Desai to lose the vote of confidence, and his government was reduced to a minority in the Lok Sabha.

[73] In the seventh general elections held in 1980, the Janata (Secular) ministry failed to maintain a majority in the Lok Sabha, and Congress once again became the ruling party.

[74] He contested for the Lok Sabha in 1984 from Bangalore North constituency against future Railway minister and Congress candidate C. K. Jaffer Sheriff, but lost the election by a margin of 40,000 votes.

[80][81] Fernandes later served in the opposition along with BJP during the two United Front governments (1996–1998) led by Janata Dal ministers H. D. Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral.

He made 18 visits to the icy heights of the 6,600 metres (4.1 mi) Siachen glacier in Kashmir, which holds the record of being "the world's highest battlefield".

[96] On 11 October 2004, George Fernandes along with Chandra Shekhar and Subramanian Swamy formed Rashtriya Swabhiman Manch to oppose Sonia Gandhi and policies adopted by the UPA government.

[101] On 30 July 2009, Fernandes filed his nomination as an independent candidate for the mid-term poll being held for the Rajya Sabha seat vacated by Janata Dal (United) president Sharad Yadav.

He was a long time supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an organisation which sought to create an independent state in the north and east of Sri Lanka.

[106] During the Emergency, as chairman of the Socialist Party of India, he faced prosecution for alleged conspiracy against the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

[107] Fernandes' name figured prominently in Operation West End, a sting operation in which journalist Mathew Samuel, armed with hidden cameras, from a controversial investigative journal, Tehelka, posing as representatives of a fictitious arms company, appeared to bribe the Bharatiya Janata Party President, Bangaru Laxman, a senior officer in the Indian Army and Jaya Jaitly, the General Secretary of the Samata Party and Fernandes' companion.

[109] On 10 October 2006, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a First information report (FIR) against Fernandes, his associate Jaya Jaitly, and former navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar for alleged irregularities in purchasing the ₹7 billion (US$81 million) Barak 1 system from Israel in 2000.

[110] Fernandes, however, said that the scientific adviser to the Defence Minister in National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Government (1998–2004), who later became the president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, had cleared the missile deal.

[95] Fernandes has claimed that he was strip searched twice at Dulles Airport in the US Capital area, when he was defence minister—once on an official visit to Washington in early 2002 and another time while en route to Brazil in mid-2003.

The details of the strip-search were mentioned in American foreign policy analyst Strobe Talbott's book Engaging India – Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb.

[115] He was accused in the 2002 coffin scam, following allegations that 500 poor quality aluminium caskets were bought from the United States at rates 13 times more than the actual price, to transport the bodies of slain soldiers, after the Kargil War.

[3] A human rights activist, Fernandes had been a member of Amnesty International, the People's Union for Civil Liberties and the Press Council of India.

[125] In the year 2022, a Canada-based Mangalorean origin writer Chris Emmanuel Dsouza[126] published a book titled Bandh Samrat – Tales of eternal rebel [127] that chronicled George Fernandes's early days of Trade union activism in his hometown of Mangalore, his early slog in his adopted city of Bombay and his association with stellar socialist figures of Mangalore like the noted Ammembala Balappa and Placid D’Mello.

Fernandes, then the general secretary of the Samyukta Socialist Party, was returning from Bangladesh while Kabir was on her way back from the battlefront where she had gone as an assistant director of the Red Cross.

[135] In August 2012 the Supreme Court of India granted permission to Jaya Jaitly, a former aide, to visit him, a move which was opposed by his wife on the grounds of her locus standi.