Former Tourism and Rural Industries Minister S. Nagoor Meeran, one of the youngest Ministers in Jayalalithaa’s first Cabinet during 1991-96, died in Madurai on Monday after a prolonged illness. He was 55, and is survived by wife Noor Jamila and sons Mubarak and Suleiman.
He suffered renal failure and was undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Madurai, where he died.
Meeran was a native of Vadakarai on the foothills of the Western Ghats in Tirunelveli. After being elected to the Tamil Nadu Assembly from the Kadayanallur constituency in 1991 as an AIADMK candidate at the age of 27, he held the Rural Industries and Tourism portfolios between 1991 and 1996. He married Dr. Jamila in 1992, with then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa presiding over the wedding.
In 1996, when the DMK was voted to power, the government arraigned him in a corruption case, accusing him and his wife of amassing wealth disproportionate to their known sources of income.
In 2000, Special Court-I judge S Sambandham convicted him and Dr. Jamila and awarded them one-year rigorous imprisonment. This was the first case from among 46 corruption cases registered by the DMK against Jayalalithaa, her erstwhile Cabinet colleagues and some bureaucrats and police officers, in which the judgment was delivered by the Special Court.
However, in 2012, the Madras High Court acquitted Meeran and his wife.
