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c
  (Tamil: ~

• born September 16, 1945) is an Indian politician

and present Union Minister of Home Affairs of the Republic of India. He is one of the most
prominent cabinet ministers of the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) union government
led by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. From May 2004 to November 2008, he was the
Finance Minister of India. However, after the resignation of Shivraj Patil, Chidambaram was
made the Home Affairs Minister.[2]

P. Chidambaram was also a Cabinet Minister with the Finance portfolio for a brief period in the
United Front coalition government from 1996 to 1998. Prior to this, he was Minister of State
(Deputy Minister) in the Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao led Congress-party governments,
holding other portfolios. He hails from the family of Nagarathar or Nattukotai Chettiars of Tamil
Nadu[citation needed].

Chidambaram, as finance minister under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Deputy Chairman
of India's Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia is a part of the Planning Commission
of India.

Chidambaram also has been a director of controversial mining company, Vedanta Resources just
before quitting to become the finance minister of India.

‰ 
 



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[3].

Chidambaram did his schooling from the prestigious Madras Christian College Hr.Sec.School,
Chennai. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) 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[4].

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.

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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 TN Youth Congress president and then the general secretary of the TNCC unit. His
rise was not sudden• in fact, it is truly a growth from the grassroot level.

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. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991, during an election campaign appearance in
the state of Tamil Nadu• in the general elections the following month a wave of sympathy for the
assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, and a disunited opposition brought the Congress party back to power.
Manmohan Singh, a socialist economist who had advised the Indian government on many
socialist policies and who was a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (India's central
bank) was made Finance Minister in the new government headed by Prime Minister Narasimha
Rao, essentially the first bureaucrat on the job in post-independent India. Manmohan Singh
implemented Narasimha Rao's reforms just as he had implemented Indira Gandhi's socialist
policies and these reforms began taking India away from the erstwhile Soviet-style centralised
planning, into a liberalized, free market economy.

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.

On November 30, 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 November 26, 2008. The public opinion
on the transfer of Chidambaram from the finance ministry to home ministry by the prime
minister was that in view of increasing terrorism a competent, efficient and brilliant hand was
needed to solve the problems.

In 2009, Chidambaram was re-elected from Sivaganga Lok Sabha constituency in the Congress
victory and retained the Home ministry.

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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 µIlakiya Chintanai¶ (Tamil Literary Foundation -
literally, Tamil Literary Thoughts), Chennai, India[citation needed].

Chidambaram has been classed as a socialist[5], was a trade union activist in his early years. He
was a critic of Friedrich Hayek and the free-market[citation needed]. Chidambaram was also
instrumental in implementing the ideas of Friedrich Engels by banning futures trades in wheat
and rice.[6] 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.[7]

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.[8] 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.[9]

He has been admired[citation needed] by the youth in the state for long[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.

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He represented the bankrupt American energy giant Enron, as a senior lawyer in India, and is
again set to revive its Dhabol power project.[10][11]

He resigned on 10 July 1992 from the Minister position owning moral responsibility for
investing in Fairgrowth, a company allegedly involved in securities scam.[12]

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.[13] 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.[14]

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.[15]

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.[16]

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.[17]

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.[18] He also said that his method of protest was wrong, but the issue was
right.[19][20] 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[21]. There have been several instances where his public positions have exposed
confusion in the policy agenda of the UPA government [22]. In the past he has regularly
announced plans to end Naxalism in the impending future. The most recent announcement was
on Jul 30 2010 [23]. Another previous such declaration was on November 10, 2009 [24].
£


His grand uncles and grand father were the Co-founders of Indian Oversea Bank,Indian
Bank,United India Insurance,Alagappa University,Annamalai University,Anna university
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7].

c

c 
Background & Education: Palaniappan Chidambaram, or PC, as he is popularly known in the Indian press,
was born on September 16, 1945 in the village of Kanadukathan in Sivaganga District of Tamilnadu state,
India. He studied at Presidency College, Chennai, India and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree
and then received his Bachelor of Law degree from the Law college of the University of Madras, Chennai.

He later went to the Harvard Business School where he took his Master of Business Administration (MBA)
degree. In 1968, he married Nalini, a successful lawyer in her own right. They have a son, Karti P
Chidambaram.


 In 1969, he enrolled as an Advocate in the Madras High Court and established a
successful law practice. He was designated as a Senior Advocate in 1984. He has chambers in Delhi and
Madras and practices in the Supreme Court and in various High Courts in India. He has also appeared in
a number of arbitration proceedings in India and abroad.
Political career:

Beginning as a member of the Congress Party, PC first got elected to Parliament from the Sivaganga
constituency in Tamil Nadu in 1984 and became a Deputy Minister under the then Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi.

Later, he held the Commerce & Finance portfolios in various governments.

In the elections held in 2004, United Progressive Alliance formed the Government and P Chidambaram
once again became the Finance Minister.

In 2008 he moved to the Home portfolio. As the home minister he has initiated steps to bring various
agencies that are responsible for law and order together and work in a cohesive manner.

å 

Economists acclaim his "dream-budget" for 1996-97, in which he brought discipline in government
spending and launched an ambitious tax reform programme to tackle an unwieldy fiscal deficit.
His daring scheme to halt tax evasion, or Voluntary Income Disclosure Scheme, invited accolades.

In the Budget of 2008, his move to waive off Farmersƞ debt has played a role in boosting aggregate
demand in the Indian economy, thereby effectively insulating India from the impact of recession.