His grandparents, who belong to a Scheduled Caste community, went from Velur in Perambalur district to Sri Lanka to work on the tea estates.

[4] Raja started his political career in his final year of undergraduate, when he joined DMK students wing, and quickly rose through party ranks.

[2] Raja was deputed as the Minister of State, Rural Development on 13 October 1996 and he continued to retain the post till 29 September 2000.

One of the key points out of the CBI is the approval of 2016 clearances given by his ministry in a span of two years from 2006 to 2008, some of which were associated with the trading of hazardous waste.

The other issue raised was about the large majority of Raja's supporters in the expert appraisals committee (EAC), responsible for granting clearances to various sectors.

[12][13] In May 2007, Dinakaran, the newspaper run by Kalanidhi Maran, the elder brother of Dayanidhi Maran who was the central minister for IT and Communication, ran into a controversy when it published the results of a series of opinion polls which showed M. K. Stalin, the second son of Karunanidhi, having more approval (70%) than his elder brother M. K. Azhagiri (2%) as the political heir of Karunanidhi.

[15] A day after the incident, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi came to Chennai for felicitating Karunanidhi for 50 years in legislative assembly.

[17] On 17 October 2008, he submitted his post-dated resignation to the DMK party chief, M. Karunanidhi, in protest of the killings of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka.

[18] The 2G spectrum financial scandal involved the alleged corrupt sale in 2008 of telecommunications bandwidth to selected organizations at prices that understated the real market value of the asset.

[22] In August 2010, evidence was submitted by the CAG showing that Raja had personally signed and approved the majority of the questionable allocations.

[25] In 2011, the results of an investigation by retired judge Shivraj Patil, who was appointed by then telecom minister Kapil Sibal, also found Raja to have been directly responsible for "procedural lapses" regarding the sale.

[28] On 2 February 2011, the CBI arrested Raja with his aide, R. K. Chandolia, and Siddharth Behura, the former telecom secretary and placed them in Tihar jail.

[37] On 15 May 2012, he was granted bail by the Supreme court under a condition that he would not visit the Department of Telecommunications nor his home state Tamil Nadu.

[41] The Enforcement Directorate grilled Raja on 10 July 2012 for four hours, to ascertain his role in grant of 2G licenses especially to Swan Telecom and Unitech Wireless.

Delhi court on 21 December 2017 acquitted all accused, including former Telecom Minister A. Raja and DMK Rajya Sabha member Kanimozhi in the 2G spectrum allocation case.