or during trade negotiations.

His wife Laxmi, a former IFS officer, is a senior UN official, serving in New York.

Within the BJP, Puri has not been a supporter of former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh.

Puri was critical of how the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government handled the Kandahar hijack incident in December 1999. India was forced to release three terrorists in its custody after Pakistani terrorists hijacked an Air India Airbus from Kathmandu and took it to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Before retiring from the IFS, Puri served as India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and did a good job as chairman of the United Nations Security Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee.

The diplomat, who started his career as a lecturer at St Stephen's College, has held important diplomatic posts in Brazil, Japan, SriLanka and the United Kingdom.

Between 1988 and 1991, he was the Coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme /United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Multilateral Trade Negotiations Project to help developing countries in the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations.

It won't be surprising if Puri gets important assignments within the BJP.

It helps that he knows the BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi well.

A few weeks ago, Puri met Modi in Gandhinagar. Puri met Modi for the first time in 1999 in Delhi, at an event organised by Jaitley.

When Puri was posted in Geneva in 2003, he spent two days with Modi when the Gujarat chief minister traveled to Switzerland to collect the ashes of Shymaji Krishna Verma, a freedom fighter from Gujarat.

Puri is deft in dealing with