Early life and education
Chidambaram was born to Kandanur L. Ct. L. Palaniyappa Chettiar and Mrs. Lakshmi Achi in Kanadukathan in the Sivaganga District, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. He was born into the royal family of Chettinad. Chidambaram did his schooling from the Madras Christian College Hr.Sec.School, Chennai. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in Statistics from The Presidency College, Chennai, he completed his Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from the Madras Law College currently Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College, Chennai, and his Masters in Business Administration (M.B.A.) from Harvard Business School. He also holds a Masters from Loyola College, Chennai.
He enrolled as an Advocate in the Chennai High Court. He was designated as a Senior Advocate in 1984. He has chambers in Delhi and Chennai and practices in the Supreme Court and in various High Courts in India. He has also appeared in a number of arbitration proceedings, both in India and abroad.
Family
His grand uncles and grand father were the Co-founders of Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank, United India Insurance and Annamalai University.
He is married to Nalini Chidambaram who is a Senior Advocate and a tax lawyer practicing in the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court, primarily in litigation related to the Central Excise department of the Government of India. He has a son, Karti P. Chidambaram, who graduated with a BBA degree from the University of Texas, and a Master of Law from Cambridge University. His son is also a politician in the Congress party.
Politics and ministerial portfolios
Chidambaram was first elected to the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of the Indian Parliament from the Sivaganga constituency of Tamil Nadu in general elections held in 1984. He was re-elected from the same constituency in the general elections of 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2009. He was a union leader for MRF and worked his way up in the Congress party.
He was the Tamil Nadu Youth Congress president and then the general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Pradesh Congress Committee (TNPCC) unit.
He was inducted into the Union (Indian federal) Council of Ministers in the government headed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on 21 September 1985 as a Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Commerce and then in the Ministry of Personnel. His main actions during his tenure in this period was to control the price of tea. He has been criticized by the Government of Sri Lanka for destroying the Sri Lankan tea trade by fixing the prices of the commodity in India using state power. He was elevated to the rank of Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions in January 1986. In October of the same year, he was appointed to the Ministry of Home Affairs as Minister of State for Internal Security. He continued to hold both offices until general elections were called in 1989. The Indian National Congress government was defeated in the general elections of 1989.
When Chidambaram was first given a ministerial post, he was one among a relatively young, well-educated class of men brought into the Government by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1984.
In June 1991, Chidambaram was inducted as a Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce, a post he held till July, 1992. He was later re-appointed Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce in February 1995 and held the post until April 1996. He made some radical changes in India's export-import (EXIM) policy, while at the Ministry of Commerce.
In 1996, Chidambaram quit the Congress party and joined a breakaway faction of the Tamil Nadu state unit of the Congress party called the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC). In the general elections held in 1996, TMC along with a few national and regional level opposition parties formed a coalition government. The coalition government came as a big break for Chidambaram, who was given the key cabinet portfolio of Finance; this put him in the limelight. The coalition government was a short-lived one (it fell in 1998), but he was reappointed to the same portfolio in the Government formed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2004.
In 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the reins of the Government for the first time and it was not until May 2004 that Chidambaram would be back in Government. Chidambaram became Minister of Finance again in the Congress party-Communist Party United Progressive Alliance government on 24 May 2004. During the intervening period Chidambaram made some experiments in his political career, leaving the Tamil Maanila Congress in 2001 and forming his own party, the Congress Jananayaka Peravai, largely focused on the regional politics of Tamil Nadu. The party failed to take off into mainstream Tamil Nadu or national politics. Just before the elections of 2004, he merged his party with the mainstream Congress party and when the Congress won the election, he was inducted into the Council of Ministers under the new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as cabinet Minister of Finance.
Political traits
Chidambaram has fulfilled multiple roles as a politician, moving from the politics of his home state of Tamil Nadu, to addressing the financial media in Mumbai, and presenting India's views at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. He is a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, and also a trustee of the Tamil ‘Ilakiya Chintanai’ (Tamil Literary Foundation – literally, Tamil Literary Thoughts), Chennai, India.
Chidambaram has been classed as a socialist, was a trade union activist in his early years. He was a critic of Friedrich Hayek and the free-market. Chidambaram was also instrumental in implementing the ideas of Friedrich Engels by banning futures trades in wheat and rice. As an ideologue opposed to the free-market and as a firm believer of the planned economy, he forced the steel industry to cut its exports and threatened the cement manufacturers to cut prices or face punitive action.
At the same time, he has also been pegged as a pro-business reformer. His Budget in 1997 was termed a "Dream Budget" by a large segment of the Indian business community. As part of the team that in 1991 laid the foundations for significant macroeconomic reforms under then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, he is widely known as someone who moved India away from the infamous 'license-quota-permit raj' towards greater economic freedom and global integration. He is particularly weasel words popular with the educated middle class in India[citation needed].
He was very close to Mr. Mooppanar. He was in No. 2 position when he was with Mooppanar in TMC. He was not in agreement with Mooppanar for aligning with AIADMK as the TMC party itself was formed opposing Congress party's alliance with AIADMK few years back. Till today, he has been dead against aligning with AIADMK, because of which he enjoys a very good rapport with the other Dravidian party DMK and its leader M Karunanidhi.
Controversies and Allegations
He represented the bankrupt American energy giant Enron, as a senior lawyer in India, and is again set to revive its Dhabol power project.
He resigned on 10 July 1992 from the Minister position owning moral responsibility for investing in Fairgrowth, a company allegedly involved in securities scam.
Chidambarams speeches for assembly elections in Tamil Nadu have been laced with anti-Hindi rhetoric and had questioned the number of Hindi speaking ministers in the NDA government although he himself was the Finance Minister at that time and later on the Home Minister for the country.
In 1997, he announced a controversial Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) which granted income-tax defaulters indefinite immunity from prosecution under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, 1973, the Income Tax Act, 1961, the Wealth Tax Act, 1957, and the Companies Act, 1956 in exchange for self-valuation and disclosure of income and assets. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India condemned the scheme in his report as abusive and a fraud on the genuine taxpayers of the country.
It should be noted that Chidambaram also represented the controversial British mining conglomerate Vedanta Resources in the Mumbai High Court until 2003 when he became the finance minister of India. He was also a member of the board of directors of that company.
In August 2006, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave permission to enquire into the allegations that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had been holding office of profit at the time of elections. It has been alleged that they both had been the board members of Rajiv Gandhi Trust Foundation. The Election Commission has been authorised to enquire into the allegations.
On 7 April 2009, P. Chidambaram was shoed by Jarnail Singh, a Sikh journalist during a press conference in Delhi. Singh, who works at the Hindi daily Dainik Jagaran was dissatisfied with Chidamabaram's answer to a question on the Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) clean chit to Congress leader Jagdish Tytler on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case. Later, Jarnail Singh appeared on a few media channels and thanked Chidambaram for taking no action against him and said that he would apologize to Chidambaram if he got a chance to meet him personally.He also said that his method of protest was wrong, but the issue was right. He also declined to take money offered to him by the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh political party.
Mr. Chidambaram has been in public conflict with other members of the UPA government on policy issues. There have been several instances where his public positions have exposed confusion in the policy agenda of the UPA government. In the past he has regularly announced plans to end Naxalism in the impending future. The most recent announcement was on Jul 30 2010. Another previous such declaration was on November 10, 2009.
In 2009 Parliamentary elections, it was alleged in 'The Hindu' that Chidambaram has pressurised the Returning Officer of Sivaganga and doctored the poll results in his favour. AIADMK candidate Kannappan who lost in the poll demanded recounting of votes, which was declined.
In December 2010, it was reported that he blamed migrants for the rising rate of crime in New Delhi. He is alleged to have said that Delhi attracts a lot of migrants who live in unauthorized colonies and indulge in behavior that is unacceptable in any modern city. His quote was apparently a reaction to the Sultanpuri gang-rape incident where an 18 year old girl was the victim. This quote attracted a lot of criticism from opposition parties, with UP chief minister Mayawati alleging that, being the Home Minister, Chidambaram was biased against North Indians
Chidambaram's effectiveness as the Minister of Home Affairs has been questioned on various occasions. Upon taking office, he promised to tackle left-wing Naxalite-Maoist insurgency. However, there has been no progress in preventing Maoist attacks in India. Chidambaram has been accused of callously sacrificing ill-equipped and unprepared CRPF jawans repeatedly. On 6 April, 2010 76 CRPF jawans were massacred in Dantewada. Besides condemning the attack, Chidambaram's ministry has made no progress in prosecuting the killers.
In 2010, there were several major attacks by Maoists including a 28 May 2010 train derailment that killed over 150 civilians, a 29 June attack that killed 26 policemen and dozens of other attacks that killed scores of security forces and civilians. Maoist attacks have continued in 2011, including the dismemberment of 10 police officials in Chhatisgarh state.
Chidambaram was criticized for his ministry's failure to prevent the 13 July 2011 Mumbai bombings, in spite of massive investments in security following the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Three years after the 2008 attacks, security preparations were found to be inadequate with communications breakdown and failures in modernizinb, procuring and installing security equipment.[30] Chidambaram defended the agencies under his ministry against the charge of intelligence failure with the response:
Having no intelligence in this case, however, does not mean that there was a failure on part of the intelligence agencies.
There has been no intelligence failure. There was no intelligence warning about 13/7.
Chidambaram was indicted in the 2G scam for failing to stop the allocation of the spectrum at throwaway prices and not going for an auction of the spectrum.
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