Palaniappan Chidambaram

Khevna.P.Shah, INN/Bangalore

@Shahkhevna1, @Infodeaofficial

Chidambaram was born to a wealthy business family in a small town south of Tamil Nadu. He completed his undergraduate higher education in Chennai, earning bachelor’s degrees in statistics and law from Presidency College and Madras Law College. He then entered the business school at  Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he completed his master’s degree in business administration in 1968. Returning to India, he began building a successful law practice, and by the mid-1980s he was arguing cases before high courts throughout the country, including the Supreme Court of India.

Entry into the politics

In the year 1972 Chidambaram entered politics when he joined the Congress Party. He began to rise steadily within the party hierarchy, serving in 1973–76 as the president of the Tamil Nadu chapter of the party’s youth wing and in 1976–77 as the general secretary of the state’s party organization. He first ran for public office in 1984, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha from a constituency in Tamil Nadu. He was re-elected six more times from the same constituency. The last time was in 2009 when he defeated a candidate from the All India Dravidian Progressive Federation (AIADMK).

In 1985 Chidambaram received his first ministerial appointment when he was named a deputy commerce minister under the government of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He served in other ministerial capacities until that government left office in 1989. With the return of the Congress Party to power in 1991, he was twice the minister of state for commerce from 1991–92 and 1995–96.

By 1996, however, Chidambaram was at odds with the Congress Party over its decision to ally with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. He joined a group of Congress members who broke away from the party in the state to form the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) and was elected to the Lok Sabha on the TMC ticket in 1996 and 1998. The TMC was part of a coalition government in 1996–98 led by the Janata Party, and Chidambaram held the finance portfolio, his first post as a cabinet minister.

Chidambaram lost his seat in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, his only electoral defeat. By 2001 he had decided to quit the TMC and form his regional party, the Congress Jananayaka Peravai (CJP or Congress Democratic Front). The CJP, however, proved to be a failed political experiment. Before the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, it merged back into the Congress Party. Chidambaram, as a Congress candidate, defeated his AIADMK opponent in the polling and reclaimed his seat.

In May 2004 Chidambaram was appointed as the finance minister in the cabinet of the new UPA government. He remained there until late 2008 when he was named home minister in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attack in November. During that tenure—which lasted until mid-2012—Chidambaram attempted to establish a national security architecture for the country by setting up new institutions such as a National Investigation Agency. Other components of his plan, including establishing a National Counter Terrorism Centre and a National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), met with objections from state governments controlled by opposition parties and were abandoned. The NATGRID, however, did begin operations in late 2013.

Chidambaram was reappointed as the finance minister in August 2012, succeeding Pranab Mukherjee, who had been elected president of India. He is widely credited with implementing a series of reforms to stem a slowdown in economic growth, curb a widening fiscal deficit, and attract more foreign investment into India. In March 2014 he announced that he would not stand for election in the Lok Sabha polls later that spring. Two months later, following the defeat of the UPA at the polls, Chidambaram’s term as finance minister ended.

Chidambaram generally was regarded as a hard-working and effective administrator, but his political career was also marked at times by accusations of corruption. Among the most serious of those was his alleged role in scandals involving the sale of wireless-telephone licenses and investments made by foreign companies in the Indian telecommunications sector. The courts either rejected those cases, however, or Chidambaram was cleared by his ministerial colleagues. Only once was his tenure as a minister disrupted by an allegation of corruption. In July 1992 he resigned as commerce minister to take responsibility for his family’s investment in a company involved in securities fraud.