 "Karti Chidambaram")
Controversy is no stranger to Karti Chidambaram. “People are very judgmental about me. They have an opinion because of my last name. The negativity about those in public life, in particular, the accusatory muck-throwing nature of politics disappoints me,” he told Business Standard in 2012.
That was about the time the social media was full of tattle about him, with charges of insider trading being tossed around recklessly. Karti did the only thing he knew. He sought the assistance of the law. He started legal proceedings against one of those people who had made slanderous statements against him. There was widespread indignation when this led a short jail term for the accuser.
This time around, it is a lot more difficult. Despite several recent setbacks in court in other cases, the Cental Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is trying to make a case that using Karti’s good offices, INX Media sought and got post facto clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) to raise money it had already raised earlier illegally. CBI says Karti’s father and then finance minister, P Chidambaram, was party to a criminal conspiracy by regularising this. Karti was paid for his services. The CBI also says a web of companies was created to obfuscate and hide the payment route.
But there are two problems here. Both are called Chidambaram.
Anyone who has worked with P Chidambaram knows it is impossible to influence, bribe or blackmail him into doing anything. And he knows administrative processes and the law too well to break it.
This is exactly what the former finance minister is saying: that there were at least five secretaries to government who were members of the FIPB. At least one, or all, should have said something? The CBI says tax enforcement agencies raised a flag when the FIPB moved to legalise wrongdoing. But it doesn’t say who, if anyone, asked them to stand down. P Chidambaram says he is being targeted because of his opposition to the Narendra Modi government and Karti and his friends are just collateral damage.
How much is fact? How much is fiction? How much is politics? It is hard to separate one from the other. But this much is clear: neither Chidambaram is overly anxious about the current phase of troubles because both are convinced they have done nothing wrong.
Although both are very different individuals.
P Chidambaram has always taken oath in the name of the Constitution — never in the name of God. Karti, by contrast, is devout and believes that a bigger force runs the universe. When he was younger, P Chidambaram opted to study in the US in the 1960s, though the trend at the time was to go to the UK — Oxford or Cambridge — because, well, that’s where people of a certain class went. He said he liked the US because everyone was treated equal. Karti began in Austin, Texas (Business Administration) but it is his stint as a post-graduate student at Cambridge that he remembers with the greatest fondness — “because of the way they teach you.”
P Chidambaram can’t imagine life without the law: he once said he would continue to study and learn law till he drops dead. If given another life to live, Karti would be a professional tennis player. “Tennis was my primary dream and ambition. If I have to rewrite my life, I would give up everything to be a tennis player of great repute” he once told Business Standard. Hours after his daughter, Aditi, was born, he made her touch a can of Slazenger Wimbledon tennis balls, hoping superstitiously that tennis would rub off on her. It didn’t. What do they have in common? Both had the option— and the resources —to live anywhere in the world, an easier life. Both opted to return to India. Karti said: “India is not an egalitarian society or country. I lead a very privileged life. I am duty bound to give back.”
You might think that the last word has been said on the Chidambaram affair. It hasn’t, not by a long chalk.
