NEW DELHI: After former Comptroller and Auditor General or CAG Vinod Rai attacked Manmohan Singh on the 2G issue, Congress leader Kamal Nath today said the former Prime Minister may have made a "mistake" in not acting despite his letter to him expressing concern over the spectrum allocation process.

"He may have made a mistake. I would go along with you. I brought it to his notice. He did not understand the import and he did not act," Mr Nath said to a private news channel.

"I was disappointed that the Prime Minister did not act.... In retrospect and hindsight, the gravity and magnitude was not known. It was not known to me and the PM. It is very unfair to say that he knew everything," the former Union Minister and Mr Singh's party colleague said.

His remarks came even as several Congress leaders defended Mr Singh on the 2G issue. The party too downplayed Mr Nath's remarks and rejected the contention that the same had vindicated Mr Rai's argument that Mr Singh could not shirk responsibility for decisions to allocate 2G telecom spectrum and coal blocks.

Asked if things would have been different had Manmohan Singh acted differently, Mr Nath said, "As recommended in my letter, if a group or a Cabinet Committee was set up, obviously the process would have changed. It required sharper and more focused attention".

"If it would not have been left to one minister alone, things would have been different," he told a private news channel.

Mr Nath said that the CAG came much later and he had written the letter earlier. "We must understand that the CAG report came much later. We did not know that."

SRINAGAR: The line was nothing less than a kilometer long. And, as the sun dipped, it was nothing short of a deluge, a mass of humanity. 

The Jammu - Srinagar highway is still closed. Large landslides at Ramsu just ahead of Banihal tunnel - the divides Jammu from Kashmir valley - have blocked the crucial highway. The only way to get out of the valley is via the aerial route.

But that is hardly a hurdle. Like Hannibal's army of yore - this army too, that of migrant workers in the valley, have walked over an entire mountain range to reach Jammu. They have walked through the mountains to reach Ramban in Jammu. Some have walked for as many as six days without any food and water for most of those days. 

"We noticed them yesterday, nearly 8,000 people crossed over today.  About 10,000 crossed over yesterday," said Brigadier Bhubesh Commader of the 11 sector of Rome Force. 

The army, he said, is making every effort to open the highway but it will take time. "We have opened a few langars (community kitchen) and medical camps at either side of the land side. Once they cross over, we put them on buses which are ferrying them to the Udhampur railway station," he said.

The exodus is a story of human grit, endurance and of human survival instinct. 

"We had nothing to eat for three days because of the rains; as soon as the weather improved I started walking," said Sunil Kumar Paswan from Bihar. He said that he tried taking shelter in a school and then in a hospital, but could not. 

"The police threw us out of the hospital and asked us to get lost," he said.  

On his way, he sold his mobile because he had no money. 

NEW DELHI:  Gujarat's Vadodara constituency vacated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is among the 36 Lok Sabha and assembly seats across 10 states where by-elections are being held.

As polling began, the Prime Minister, in a tweet, urged voters "across the country today to vote in large numbers".   

                                        Here are the latest developments:



 
The seat was vacated by Mulayam Singh after the national elections; the Samajwadi Party chief contested and had won two seats in Uttar Pradesh, which his party rules. Tej Pratap is the grandson of Mulayam's older brother Ratan Singh Yadav.

The 26-year-old refutes the charge that he is a product of dynastic politics and says he has been living in Saifai, the family village, for the last few years and is contesting "on popular demand."

Tej Pratap appears to be confident that he will win the seat that his grand uncle has won five times. He is dismissive of the BJP - which had won 71 of UP's 80 Lok Sabha seats in this year's national elections - saying that the people are "tired of its divisive politics."

"In the last bypolls, be it Bihar or Karnataka, everywhere the BJP has lost. This means that the popular sentiment accompanying the Lok Sabha elections has now died down and I am confident that the people of Uttar Pradesh will give their verdict in favor of the Samajwadi Party this time," said Mr Yadav in Mainpuri.
 
With an MBA from Amity University, he went on to do an MSc in Management from the UK. He has been part of the party's organisation in Saifai and was Mulayam's election agent during the Lok Sabha polls.
 
Today is the last day of campaigning for the by-elections for 11 assembly and 1 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh. A resurgent BJP takes on the ruling Samajwadi Party, headed in the state by Tej Pratap's uncle Akhilesh Yadav, who faces criticism for not being able to check growing incidents of communal tension.