CHENNAI: After a hiatus of 13 years, Jayanthi Natarajan is back in the Union government yet again. The 57-year old spokesperson of the ruling Congress, she is the only prominent woman leader of the party in Tamil Nadu. Also, she is the first Minister of State from Tamil Nadu. for the grand old party at the Centre. The grand daughter of the last Congress Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (1963-67), M Bakthavatsalam, she is the daughter of Rukmini and Dr CR Sundararajan. Rukmini is the second daughter of Bakthavatsalam. Jayanthi married V K Natarajan in 1974 and has a son. After joining the Congress party in 1980, she was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1986 and re-elected in 1992. A staunch loyalist of G K Moopanar, the undisputed icon of the Congress in the State during the post-Kamaraj era, she parted ways with the parent party when Moopanar founded the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) in 1996 in protest against the decision to align with the AIADMK. On the fateful day of May 21, 1991, when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, she was among those who identified the young leader. She resigned her RS membership in September 1997 and was elected again in October that year as a TMC nominee. In the United Front government, she was a Minister of State in the Ministries of Civil Aviation and Parliamentary Affairs between June 1997 and March 1998. After the death of Moopanar (2001), when the TMC reunited with the Congress in 2002, Jayanthi came back to the parent party. She had held various positions in several Parliamentary panels, and was the national spokesperson for the Congress. Jayanthi Natarajan became a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the 2G spectrum scam from the Rajya Sabha after Abhishek Singhvi opted out of the panel as he had represented telecom companies in court. A former news anchor for Doordarshan in Chennai, she is a lawyer by profession. She graduated from Ethiraj College and studied law at the Dr Ambedkar Government Madras Law College.
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