P. Chidambaram

Palaniappan Chidambaram (born 16 September 1945), better known as P. Chidambaram, is an Indian politician and lawyer who currently serves as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha.

After graduating with a BSc degree in statistics from the Presidency College, Chennai, he completed his Bachelor of Laws from the Madras Law College (now Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College) and his MBA from Harvard Business School in the class of 1968.

He also holds a master's degree from Loyola College, Chennai.

During this time his politics inclined to the left and in 1969 he joined N. Ram, later an editor of The Hindu, and the women's activist Mythili Sivaraman in starting a journal called the Radical Review.

Chidambaram has two brothers and one sister.

His father's business interests covered textiles, trading and plantations in India.

He chose to concentrate on his legal practice and stayed away from the family business.

He enrolled as a lawyer in the Madras High Court, becoming a senior advocate in 1984.

He had offices in Delhi and Chennai and practiced in the Supreme Court and various high courts of India.

Chidambaram was 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 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 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 and 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.

In June 1991, Chidambaram was inducted as a Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce, by the then Prime Minister Mr P V Narasimha Rao; 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.

His 1997 budget is still remembered as the dream budget for the Indian economy.

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.

During the intervening period Chidambaram made some experiments in his political career, leaving the TMC 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.

Most recently, he held the role for the entirety of the United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 to 2014, except for a three-year period as Minister of Home Affairs, during which he oversaw India's domestic security response to the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

Chidambaram became Minister of Finance again in the Congress party led United Progressive Alliance government on 24 May 2004.

After the elections of 2004, 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 and he merged his party with the mainstream Congress party.

On 30 November 2008, he was appointed the Union Home Minister following the resignation of Shivraj Patil who had come under intense pressure to tender his resignation following a series of terror attacks in India, including the Mumbai attacks on 26 November 2008.

Chidambaram returned as Finance Minister in July 2012, succeeding Pranab Mukherjee, who resigned to become the President of India.

Chidambaram was born to Kandanur L. Ct. L. Palaniappa Chettiar and Lakshmi Achi in Kanadukathan in the Sivaganga district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

His maternal grandfather was Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar, a wealthy merchant and banker from Chettinad.

Chidambaram did his schooling at the Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School, Chennai he passed the one-year pre-University course from Loyola College, Chennai.

He served as the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs from 2017 to 2018.

And also served Interim Deputy Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha from 2022 to 2023 under Mallikarjun Kharge.

Chidambaram has served as the Union Minister of Finance four times.