Palaniappan Chidambaram (born September 16, 1945, Kanadukathan, India) is an Indian politician and government official who rose to a prominent position in the leadership of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). He is best known for his service in a variety of ministerial posts in Congress-led governments, notably in the cabinet of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government (2004–14).
Chidambaram was born to a wealthy business family in a small town south of Pudukkottai in what is now southern Tamil Nadu state, in southeastern India. He completed his undergraduate higher education in Madras (now Chennai), earning bachelor’s degrees in statistics and law from, respectively, Presidency College and Madras Law College (now Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College). He then entered the business school at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he completed a 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.
Chidambaram entered politics in 1972, 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 (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) from a constituency in Tamil Nadu. He was reelected six more times from the same constituency, the last time being in 2009, when he narrowly defeated a candidate from the All India Dravidian Progressive Federation (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; AIADMK), a strong regional party.
Chidambaram received his first ministerial appointment in 1985, when he was named a deputy commerce minister in the government of 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 twice was the minister of state for commerce (1991–92 and 1995–96).
By 1996, however, Chidambaram was at odds with the Congress Party over its decision to form an alliance 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 own regional party, the Congress Jananayaka Peravai (CJP; 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 finance minister in the cabinet of the new UPA government. He remained there until late 2008, when, in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November, he was named home minister. 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.