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