Karti Chidambaram's wife Srinidhi Chidambaram enters 'backstage' politics

MADURAI: The Congress has launched a new face from the Chidambaram household in the Sivaganga Lok Sabha battle scene, albeit behind the scenes. Srinidhi Chidambaram, daughter-in-law of former Union minister P Chidambaram, will lead the social media campaign for her husband Karti who is expected to be fielded from there.

A doctor by profession and Bharathanatyam exponent, she had kept away from politics all this while. Her father-in-law and seven-time member of parliament from Sivaganga is not believed to be contesting this time. Instead, his son Karti Chidambaram, who unsuccessfully contested the 2014 Lok Sabha election from the seat, polling 1,04,678 votes, is expected to be fielded again.

Many of the Congress cadres say they were surprised to see Srinidhi address a party meeting at Karaikudi two days ago, "Some of us did not know who she was because we had never seen her,’’ said a cadre from Sivaganga. He said she spoke about how social media campaign could help the party. “We are all in a WhatsApp group for which she is the admin and were told that we will start getting instructions through it daily,’’ he said.

There was hardly any women at the meeting chaired by Srinidhi and it was mostly her husband Karti who spoke to the cadres. He said this was an era when almost everybody had a mobile phone and social media could be used as the most powerful tool to reach out to the people. "In every political party it is always more men and rarely women. This should change and you should reach out to as many female voters who form 50% of the voters," he said adding that tracking the performance of cadres on their social media promotions would be easy. "Work well and a prize awaits the assembly constituency which performs well in the social media promotional activities,’’ he said.

A senior Congress member says that Srinidhi is also being promoted politically as a backup for Karti lest he runs into hurdles in his candidature. Congress district president N Sundaram said that Srinidhi was not a member of the party and that she was coming in to help Karti. "She has taken on the responsibility of handling the social media for the party and we will ask for the Sivaganga seat,’’ he said.