Results of four assembly by-polls were announced on Monday, and not one went in favour of the Congress.

The worst defeat was in Haryana, where the Congress came third, and its candidate lost his deposit. Things couldn't get more humiliating in a state once considered a stronghold of the Congress.

Team Anna had urged people in Hisar to vote against the Congress to protest against the party not passing the Jan Lokpal Bill. Arvind Kejriwal, a prominent member of the anti-corruption alliance, had described the Hisar election as a referendum on the bill.

BJP leader LK Advani was quick enough to conclude the results were a warning to the UPA. (His Jan Chetna Yatra, now on, hopes to cash in on the anti-corruption wave across the country, but it is hobbled by Karnataka BJP leaders like BS Yeddyurappa, Katta Subramanya Naidu, and Janardhana Reddy, all of whom are languishing in jail on serious criminal charges. On Tuesday, Advani for the first time distanced himself from Yeddyurappa,

Publications in the West are reporting widely on the indictment of Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan origin American, for insider trading, but a magazine is talking about what actually did him in: his alleged support for violent Sri Lankan separatists.

Rajaratnam has just been awarded a 11-year-prison sentence for bribing his way to wealth in stock trading.

The New York Times says this is the longest term in the US for a crime of this sort.  Vanity Fair describes Rajaratnam as a "formidably mustachioed finance villain."  It writes: "Rajaratnam, one of the few recent public figures whose phones have been legally tapped, was the overlord of a hedge fund called the Galleon Group. He pocketed about $70 million through illegal means. Most of that now belongs to the government."

In an extensively researched profile (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Raj) of the white collar criminal, Vanity Fair says the FBI spied on him for over a decade before nailing him. The American investigators' interest in

The game is up for the Marans. On Monday, as the CBI was raiding their homes and offices, their party, the DMK, was in no mood to rush to their rescue.

They will now have to fight their battles alone, with no support either from the Karunanidhi family, to which it is closely related, or from the larger political alliance in Delhi that had protected them all these years.

After the DMK lost power in Tamil Nadu, the Marans' business began feeling the heat from the new dispensation. Soon after assuming power, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa made sure their cable business wouldn't thrive as it used to under a government run by their uncle and cousins.

The DMK's top leaders remained quiet about the raids in Chennai, Hyderabad and Chennai. Neither Karunanidhi nor his influential sons Stalin and Azhagiri were reacting to the crisis in the Maran family, which owns the Sun TV empire.

T R Baalu, the former union minister, mumbled something about how the raids were about 'business transactions' and

The arrest of Sanjiv Bhatt, Gujarat's top policeman, shows how politics and policing are intertwined in India, and what happens when an officer breaks ranks and speaks out against his bosses.

No one is in doubt that Chief Minister Narendra Modi wants IPS officer Bhatt cornered. Bhatt is a witness in three critical cases, with Modi being accused No 1 in one of them. Modi allegedly allowed violent mobs to target Muslim families after 58 Hindu pilgrims were burnt alive in Godhra. The riots that followed claimed some 2,000 lives.

Bhatt is now in judicial custody, and his plight shows how difficult life can be for whistle-blowers. He was in a senior position when the riots broke out, and has been saying Modi told the police the rioters should be allowed to vent their anger. (This he said in an affidavit to the Supreme Court).

The arrest has upset many, including Anna Hazare. "'What Narendra Modi has done is wrong. It is not good for democracy in the country," the anti-corruption crusader