Muhammed Hamid Ansari is VP Again

Alig and former Vice Chancellor of your beloved Alma Mater is Vice President of the People's Secular Democratic Republic of India.

BBC:

Hamid Ansari has won the Indian vice-presidential election for the second successive time.

Mr Ansari, a former career diplomat, beat rival Jaswant Singh by 490 votes to 238 to retain the position.

Hindustan Times: 

Ahead of the poll, UPA chaiperson Sonia Gandhi on Monday hosted a lunch for UPA constituents and the parties supporting it from outside, which projected a complete picture of unity. Trinamool Congress MPs attended Gandhi's lunch and the party is expected to go public with its support Ansari ahead of the polls. Not only all UPA constituents but also the chiefs of Samajwadi Party and BSP Mualyam Singh Yadav and Mayawati attended the lunch. The two leaders, arch rival in Uttar Pradesh politics, had not attended any such programme together for several years.

IBN-Live

Mohammad Hamid Ansari was born in Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) on April 1, 1937, though his family hailed from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh. The grand nephew of former Congress President Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, a leader of the Indian independence movement, Ansari studied at Shimla's St. Edwards High School and St. Xavier's College of the University of Calcutta.
A two-doctorate degree holder, he joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1961. He was Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and High Commissioner to Australia. He also served as New Delhi’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations based in New York.

First Post:

A Padma Shree awardee, Ansari became Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University in May, 2000 and held the post till March, 2002. Ansari is also known for his role in ensuring compensation to the victims of the Gujarat riots and pushing for a complete re-look into the relief and rehabilitation for riot victims since 1984.
He also dealt with criticism for being non-political when he took over as vice-president in 2007 in his own inimitable way. ”No citizen is apolitical; as a citizen, by definition, has to take interest in public affairs,” he had then said.

 Times of India:

Ansari is the second Vice President to be re-elected after S Radhakrishnan who was the first to get two terms from 1952 to 1962. An affable and well-read person, Ansari was the second choice of Congress president Sonia Gandhi for the President's post and lost out to Pranab Mukherjee due to some brinkmanship by TMC leader Mamata Banerjee and SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav.