P Chidambaram Age

Congress leader P Chidambaram was born 16 September 1945. He is 73 years old.

P Chidambaram Education

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

After graduating with a BSc degree in statistics from the Presidency College, Chennai, he completed his Bachelor of Laws from 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 in Chennai.

P Chidambaram Family

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.

Chidambaram has two brothers and one sister. Chidambaram’s mother, Lakshmi Acchi, was the daughter of Sir Annamalai Chettiar, a banker and merchant, and was granted the title of Raja by the British Raj.

Annamalai Chettiar was the founder of Annamalai University and United India Insurance Company Limited. His brother Ramaswami Chettiar was the founder of Indian Bank and the co-founder of another major banks.

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.

P Chidambaram Son

Karti Chidambaram is only son of Palaniappan Chidambaram and his wife Nalini Chidambaram. Karti Chidambaram studied at Don Bosco School in Egmore, Chennai.

He went on to study business management at the University of Texas at Austin and law at the University of Cambridge.

Later Karti Chidambaram is married to Dr. Srinidhi Rangarajan, a Bharathanatiyam dancer and physician who works with Apollo Hospitals. They have a daughter, Aditi Nalini Chidambaram. He is an avid tennis player who had won many tournaments

P Chidambaram Biography

He enrolled as a lawyer in the Madras High Court, becoming a senior advocate in 1984. Later Chidambaram had offices in Delhi and Chennai and practised in the Supreme Court and various high courts of India.

He was a union leader for MRF and worked his way up in the Congress party. Soon he was the Tamil Nadu Youth Congress president and then the general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Pradesh Congress Committee unit

P Chidambaram Party

People elected Chidambaram to the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of the Indian Parliament from the Sivaganga constituency of Tamil Nadu in general elections held in 1984.

Later 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.

In June 1991, Prime Minister inducted Chidambaram 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. Soon he made some radical changes in India’s export-import (EXIM) policy, while at the Ministry of Commerce. Later 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).

It was not until May 2004 that Chidambaram would be back in Government. Later Chidambaram became Minister of Finance again in the Congress party – Communist Party United Progressive Alliance government on 24 May 2004.

On 30 November 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed him 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.

Sensing defeat, he ceded his seat to his son Karti in 2014, which resulted in electoral defeat for his son. Later Indian National Congress appointed P. Chidambaram as one of thirteen senior spokespersons on 15 September 2014.

P Chidambaram Caste

He belongs to Chettiar Caste. Chettiar or Chetti is a title used by many mercantile, agricultural and land owning castes in South India.

P Chidambaram Books

Fearless in Opposition: Power and Accountability
Standing Guard: A Year in Opposition
A View from the Outside: Why Good Economics Works for Everyone