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Jayanthi Natarajan snaps 30-year-old ties with Congress (Profile)
A fourth generation Congress worker, Jayanthi Natarajan, who quit the
party Friday, was a former environment minister in the erstwhile United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and had long served the party as
its national spokesperson.
Seen as part of Congress president
Sonia Gandhi's coterie, she was privy to several key decisions made by
the party top brass before being put out in the public domain.
Grand-daughter
of former Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Bakthavatsalam, Natarajan hails
from a family of Congress veterans who were associated with the Indian
National Congress since its inception in 1885.
Her great-grandfather was a member of India's Constituent Assembly.
Born
in 1954, Natarajan did her schooling from Sacred Heart Matriculation
Higher Secondary School in Chennai and studied law to pursue a career.
A
Chennai-based lawyer, Natarajan entered politics as a Youth Congress
worker in the 1980s. She was later noticed by the then Congress
president Rajiv Gandhi, who placed her in the Rajya Sabha for the first
time in 1986.
In a career that spans over 30 years, she has
thrice been re-elected to the upper house of the parliament in 1992,
1997 and 2008.
In a brief spell away from the Congress, Natrajan
joined the Tamil Maanila Congress floated by late Congress veteran G.K.
Moopanar in 1996 over differences with then Prime Minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao.
She resigned from the Rajya Sabha and was re-elected in 1997 as a Tamil Maanila Congress member.
After
the Tamil Maanila Congress allied with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in
Tamil Nadu and joined the United Front Government at the centre,
Natarajan served in the then I.K. Gujral cabinet in 1997 as minister of
state for coal, civil aviation and parliamentary affairs.
Subsequent
to the Tamil Maanila Congress' merger with the Congress following
Moopanar's death in 2002, Natarajan was appointed the party's national
spokesperson.
She succeeded Jairam Ramesh and served in the UPA
II as minister of state for environment and forests (independent charge)
for four months before she put in her papers in December 2013.
Natarajan
later alleged that she was asked by party president Sonia Gandhi to
resign from her post and work for the organisation to focus on party
work in the run up to the 2014 general election.
Dealing a blow
to the Congress, Natarajan Friday quit the party, saying she was shunted
despite her diligence in toeing the "party line" and acting on
"specific inputs" from Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's office
during her tenure as the environment minister.