FULL HOUSE

HUSBAND: Palaniappan Chidambaram, the country’s finance minister, likes to read SON: Karti, who has done business administration and law, is a keen tennis player DAUGHTER-IN-LAW: Srinidhi, a medical graduate, is a classical dancer.

The Ford Escort comes to a grinding halt in the driveway of P. Chidambaram’s spacious bungalow on Pycrofts Garden Road in the tony Nungambakkam area of Chennai. Clad in an all-black advocate’s cloak, the finance minister’s lawyer-wife alights from the car and spots her little granddaughter out in the garden, frolicking with the family’s three dogs. “Hey, do you want to go out and play?” she asks Aditi Nalini, noticing her springing gate-bound feet.

Clearly, Nalini Chidambaram is a sign reader. And that would explain why, in the eye of an ugly storm last week, Nalini is keeping away from the media. She steps into her well-appointed ground floor office, followed by two large green cloth bags of case files, and disappears into the house after shooting a few instructions to her office staff. “She is very upset,” explains a family insider.

There is reason for the 59-year-old lawyer to be upset. Nalini Chidambaram’s name is being bandied about in Parliament by irate Opposition members who have taken exception to her appointment as a senior legal counsel to the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), which comes under her husband’s ministry. Her supporters point out that Nalini has assiduously kept away from politics. In fact, but for her standing as a lawyer, many believe that she could pass off as a typical, placid south Indian housewife.

Not everybody would agree. Rajya Sabha member P. Jothi, who first raised the Nalini Chidambaram issue in Parliament, for one, thinks there are wheels within wheels in the entire issue. “This does not surprise me. But I have to say that a lot of surprises are now in store for people,” says the lawyer-MP of J. Jayalalithaa’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party. The controversy broke out last Friday. In what is often described as a day of fast-moving events, Jothi raised the matter in Parliament.

The Bharatiya Janata Party described it as “a clear case of corruption where a Cabinet minister has helped his wife get a job that brings in huge financial benefits” and demanded the minister’s resignation. Chidambaram said he knew nothing about it, and the CBDT apologised profusely to the minister. Nalini returned her fees to the CBDT (“when there is so much controversy over this, is the money important?” asks a family source ruefully).

But in and outside political circles, the issue is still being discussed. Not too many members of the legal fraternity in Chennai see any “conflict of interest” in this instance. Most lawyers seek to stress that when a husband and wife have separate legal practices, cases are often not discussed with each other. “And Nalini Chidambaram is normally flooded with briefs,” says a senior lawyer, Kamatchi Sundaresan. “So she does not require this income tax case to make any money.”

Nalini, indeed, has links with law that predate her relationship with the finance minister. Her father, Justice P.S. Kailasam, was a former judge of the Supreme Court and former Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, while mother Soundaram Kailasam was a Tamil poet. It was her father who encouraged her to take up law, family sources say.

A Chennai girl, Nalini did her schooling from the Vidyodhaya School, known for its well-established alumni. A graduate of Stella Maris College, she did her law degree from the Madras Law College. It was while she was studying law that she met Chidambaram, then a young man with stars and sickles in his eyes.

For Chidambaram, law and politics went hand in hand. He started out as a labour-rights activist, fighting for workers at tyre company MRF. The radical Chidambaram and the conservative Nalini got married in 1968 ? despite opposition from the family, for it was an inter-caste marriage. Since then, the two have chalked out their own legal careers, though there were brief periods when they worked together ? as juniors in constitutional expert K.K. Venugopal’s office, for instance.

Nalini has been an advocate since 1968 and became a senior advocate in 1990. She was the first woman to be designated a “senior advocate” in the Madras Bar. “Nalini has an independent practice which she has built up over the years,” says R. Sounderarajan, a senior advocate in the Madras High Court, dubbing the political tirade over her appearing as a special counsel for the CBDT in July and August 2004, as a case of “making a mountain out of a molehill”.

Nalini, who specialises in taxation, constitutional, administrative and corporate law, appears often in the high courts of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Cochin, Bombay and Delhi and in the Supreme Court of India. She became a senior standing counsel of the income tax department in the Seventies, but has essentially been busy with her private practice.

One of her recent cases involved students challenging the Tamil Nadu government’s order abolishing the ‘Common Entrance Test’ for admission to professional colleges in the state. She fought on behalf of the DMK’s Progressive Labour Union and the CITU for the reinstatement of dismissed government employees of the Tamil Nadu government. She was a lawyer in the Mysore and Bangalore Palace acquisition cases and suits challenging the restriction on women working in night shifts under the Factories Act.

But for Jothi, that’s a lot of piffle. “Some people have a good appearance, but may not have a good attitude. And some people are like the jackfruit ? not good to look at, but sweet inside,” he says, somewhat cryptically. All that he is ready to spell out is that the Nalini Chidambaram case is not over. “You just wait and watch,” he says.