Gosh! So many Tamil FMs: History repeats itself, again

Like Nirmala Sitharaman, India's first finance minister, R K Shanmukham Chetty, was from Tamil Nadu. And so were T T Krishnamachari, C Subramaniam, R Venkataraman and P Chidambaram

One of the peculiarities of independent India has been the number of finance ministers just one state has supplied: Tamil Nadu. The first finance minister, R K Shanmukham Chetty, was from there. He was a surprise choice. After him, there have been T T Krishnamachari (known as TTK), C Subramaniam, R Venkataraman, P Chidambaram and now Nirmala Sitharaman. That makes five in all.

The others have been John Mathai (Kerala), C D Deshmukh, Y B Chavan, S B Chavan and Madhu Dandavate (Maharashtra), Morarji Desai and H M Patel (Gujarat), Manmohan Singh (Punjab, or Assam), Pranab Mukherjee and Sachin Chaudhuri (Bengal), Yashwant Sinha (Bihar), Charan Singh and V P Singh (Uttar Pradesh) and Arun Jaitley (Delhi). 

Thus, as far as full-time finance ministers are concerned, barring Manmohan Singh and John Mathai, the rest have been from the industrialised or at least the better-off states. Interestingly, three of them – Morarji Desai, V P Singh and Manmohan Singh have gone on to become prime ministers. 

Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were also finance ministers for a year each. Grandfather and grandson didn’t do much but Indira Gandhi completely changed the DOS of the Indian fiscal system. 

I am not counting Charan Singh, who never faced Parliament.

Unlucky Tamils

But coming back to the Tamils, each was chosen because he or she had no political base. Shanmukham Chetty was a businessman, as was TTK. C Subramaniam and R Venkataraman were loyal Congressmen but that’s about all. 

When P Chidambaram came of age in politics, the Dravidian parties had already made Tamil Nadu Congress-mukt. And Nirmala Sitharaman would be the last person to claim she has a political base.

Chetty and Subramaniam lasted for just over two-and-a-half years but TTK lasted seven years and had two stints. Venkataraman lasted two-and-a-half years because he was made vice-president. Chidambaram had three stints and was finance minister the longest – eight years. 

Chidambaram was also the luckiest as he never had to face a major crisis. Nor Subramaniam. But Chetty, TTK and Venkataraman did. The former had to deal with the partition of India and its various consequences. TTK had to deal with the aftermath of the India-China war of 1962 and Venkataraman had to deal with the consequences of the oil shock of 1979, not to mention Charan Singh’s disastrous budget of that year.

In each case, as with Nirmala Sitharaman now, the government was completely broke. This happened to Dandavate and Manmohan Singh also.

File photo of Nirmala Sitharaman

Tamil FMs and RBI governors

Another curious feature of Tamil finance ministers is that most of them have had a bad relationship with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The only exception was Venkataraman who had no problems with the then RBI governor I G Patel.

All the others had clashes of differing intensity, the worst being the one between TTK and Sir Benegal Rama Rau in 1958. TTK rather rudely told Rau who the boss was. Rau protested to Nehru and said he would resign. Nehru said ok, buzz off.

Subramaniam treated S Jagannatha shabbily because the latter refused to double the credit limit for Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti on the grounds that it didn’t even have a factory. And, of course, the clashes between Chidambaram and Y V Reddy are too recent to have been forgotten.

And you know what was odd about these clashes of wills and ego? In each case the protagonists were from the South: Sir Rama Rau was a Kannadiga. Jagannathan was a Tamil. And Reddy was from Andhra.

Thank God then that Shaktikanta Das, the current RBI governor, is from Odisha.