Ex chief minister of the state of Bihar and the current railway minister, is making the citizens of our country India, fools as he is a very witty man. A couple of years ago as he started serving as the railway minister, he increased the prices of all tickets saying that he had improved the engines of the trains and the trains service although everything remains the same. There have been more accidents taking place on the railway lines since his rule. Trains are running into tracks where the railway lines are broken. I hope this time during the elections the citizens do not get convinced by his convincing speeches and select someone who will do well for them, like people of Bihar who got Nitish Kumar into power.

 

He is the darling of Indian industrialists who were relieved when the United Front government chose him to become the new Finance Minister. But very few know that P Chidambaram, the US educated votary of free enterprise and unbridled economic reforms used to be a hard-core leftist arguing in favor of the command economy in the late 1960s.

Since then he has come a long way. A scion of a prominent industrialist family from Madras, Chidambaram chose to stay away from the predictable path of joining the family business and went into politics. He joined the Congress after it lost power in 1967 and remained with Indira Gandhi when the party split in 1969.

As a young lawyer he boasted an impressive array of clients-even now, whenever he has been out of the government, he has been consulted by top notch firms including the controversial US company Enron which ran into trouble in India because of a power plant project. Chidambaram came to the attention of the youthful prime minister Rajeev Gandhi in 1984 and since then has had a meteoric rise to the top. He was Rajiv’s emissary to the Tamil Nadu leadership during the crisis of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees; after Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, Chidambaram was out of power for a short while but came back as Commerce Minister in the new government. He fitted in well with the new pro-reforms lobby and his ministry was responsible for doing away with several red tape regulations which boosted Indian exports. Ironically, though he played a big part in writing the Congress manifesto in the 1996 elections, a disagreement with his party’s decision over political alignments led to him resigning and setting up a new political outfit. He won his parliamentary seat handsomely and now finds himself in opposition to the Congress.

But for many people, especially investors both domestic and foreign, Chidambaram’s presence in the government in such a sensitive post is a positive signal and they are all looking forward to what his budget proposals will be.