Congress candidate Shafia Zubair won the Ramgarh assembly poll in Rajasthan, while BJP candidate Krishan Middha won over his nearest rival from the Jannayak Janata Party for the high-stakes Jind bypoll in Haryana.
Expressing concern over the situation in Afghanistan, a group of eminent persons, including former ministers K Natwar Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Mani Shankar Aiyar, on Wednesday urged the government to continue engaging with the Taliban and not allow any political party to use the developments in that country to communally polarise Indian society for electoral gains.
The night before Dr Singh was to meet President Bush, he said he could not sign the agreement.
Riding a strong anti-incumbency wave coupled with Narendra Modi factor, BJP on wrested power from Congress decimating it by grabbing a three-fourth majority in the 200-member Rajasthan Assembly.
Jaishankar is the first foreign secretary to head the Ministry of External Affairs as minister.
Former external affairs minister, K Natwar Singh, shares his critique of the Narendra Modi government's foreign policy in this e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis. Edited excerpts
'She is tough. She can be stern. She can be unpleasant. Rajiv was none of these things.' 'The Congress cannot survive without the Gandhi family. If Sonia were to quit, their Lok Sabha seats would drop from 44 to four.' K Natwar Singh shares his bitterness about the Nehru family with Rashme Sehgal.
Manmohan Singh had told his team to "call off" the Indo-US civil nuclear deal a night before its scheduled announcement by President George Bush after Americans came with a killer proposal to let India have just two of its nuclear reactors out of the international safeguards, a top aide of the former Prime Minister has said.
China will flood direct flights to India with wholesale takeaways of the authentic stuff; Indian businessmen will fight for the commission and the consumers for the cuisine, predicts Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
'Surprised and pained that my name has been dragged into Indian domestic politics,' says Pakistan's former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri.
The Congress on Tuesday sought to make more trouble for the government on Lalitgate issue, putting forth six demands including making public minutes of a meeting it claimed External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had with United Kingdom High Commissioner James Bevan in which she had favoured grant of travel documents to Lalit Modi.
'Sachin Pilot once calculated that with a million Indians flooding the labour market every month, only an additional 12 million jobs annually could keep unemployment at the same level.' 'That's chickenfeed for the functionaries who cram my e-mail inbox every day with such a constant flow of job offers that trying to empty it is like trying to drink dry the horn connected to the ocean in Norse mythology,' says Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
Singh issued a statement on Monday, listing those who attended the dinner, and stressed that the election was not discussed during the meeting.
'Some of his decisions were not so good, but his intentions were always guided by a deep national interest.'
Ataturk and Nehru, two liberal secular modernisers, are in peril of being disowned by their successors, says Sunanda K-Datta Ray.
'It has even been suggested that Modi and Amit Shah, however grudgingly, harbour admiration for her controlling streak and steely resilience,' says Sunil Sethi.
The CBI says it has 79 witnesses in this case.
When I worked in Mrs Indira Gandhi's Secretariat from 1966 to 1971, the entire officer component was less than ten. Today, the PMO seems to resemble a mini public meeting. When numbers increase, excellence suffers.
We look back at the many leaders who took contention with Rahul Gandhi in the recent past.
The persons named are Bhupinder Singh alias Rahul, a freelance journalist, Judeo's personal secretary Natwar Rateria and one Arvind Vijay Mohan.
Modi has the ideas for a new, hopeful India, and an idiom in which to sell optimism to voters. But he doesn't yet have the team for it, and soon enough, questions will begin to be asked by an impatient, non-ideological, I-don't-owe-anybody-anything generation of Indian voters, says Shekar Gupta.
Ambitious diplomats continue to be attracted to politics but do they make good politicians, asks Jyoti Malhotra
Bhupender Singh Patel, Arvind Vijay Mohan and Rajat Prasad, who played pivotal role for carrying out the sting operation, have also been charged under various provisions of Indian Penal Code and Prevention of Corruption Act.
In a bid to evolve a political consensus before the bilateral talks, the United Progressive Alliance government has begun discussions with opposition leaders as part of which Natwar Singh had met Leader of Opposition L K Advani on Thursday.
There was no breakthrough in US Secretary of State John F Kerry's India visit, but no breakdown either, says C Uday Bhaskar.
He told the Lok Sabha that in relation to offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act the superintendence of the CBI has been vested in the CVC.
A similar notice has been issued to Judeo's personal secretary Natwar Rateria.
The CBI would now decide whether to convert the preliminary enquiry into a regular case.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's hot saffronite swami is yoga teacher Ramdev.
The BJP's victory in the desert state was so absolute that the Congress failed to open its electoral account in 17 of Rajasthan's 33 districts! P B Chandra reports.
'E Ahamed will be sorely missed as a decent and wise man who made the best use of his political career and personal abilities for the good of the nation,' remembers Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
'Oommen Chandy may well prove to be the Teflon chief minister whose reputation cannot be tarnished,' predicts Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
'Kofi Annan will be remembered more for his Nobel Prize and related glory rather than Rwanda and Volcker,' notes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan with whom he worked in the UN.
It is unlikely that Delhi's outgoing chief minister will be able to make a comeback in politics. For her, the innings is truly over, writes Pankaj Vohra.
'A close look at the time-lines tells you that exactly as the back-channel negotiations were in their most crucial stage, "somebody" was planning the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai,' says Shekhar Gupta questioning Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri's account of a peace deal with India.
'This is not a Sanjay Baru or Natwar Singh type of book. It's not a memoir. It's not a book to reveal conversations, real or imaginary. This is not a book to position myself at the centre of the world.' Jairam Ramesh on his stint as environment minister.
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