The political stability that Tamil Nadu saw under Chief Minister Jayalalithaa may be a thing of the past, as the new administration struggles to find its feel, says R Rajagopalan.
It's a close fight between the Election Commission trying its hardest to prevent Tamil Nadu's electoral malpractice and the political parties out to buy votes at any cost, says B Srikumar.
'Even though we are very religious and God fearing, we do not subscribe to the kind of Hindutva they practise, a very hierarchical, Brahmanical, Hindutva.'
In a week from now, December 21, voters in R K Nagar in Chennai will decide who their MLA will be.
Strongly defending former chief minister and party supremo Jayalalithaa's aide V K Sasikala, ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on Saturday said there is nothing wrong in its leaders calling on her as she is a key member and asserted a person would soon be elected to the top post of General Secretary.
The twin announcements have virutally cleared the decks for the merger of the two factions.
Madras high court on Friday restrained the police from arresting the film's director A R Murugadoss till November 27.
It had all the makings of a movie thriller. Students who paid a few lakh rupees were supplied with vanishing ink. Answer papers were intercepted on the way and corrected. No one would have been wiser had the perpetrators of the exam scam not gotten greedy.
It is a sea of men clad in veshtis with distinctive party colour border design seeking votes with a smile and folded hands for their party candidates. The town is abuzz, with electioneering at its peak, and teeming trendy cars criss-cross the busy roads and bylanes bringing in more and more leaders from elsewhere for campaign.
Tamil Nadu Governor K Rosaiah on Friday accepted the resignation of Chief Minister O Panneerselvam and invited All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Jayalalithaa to form the new government.
The Congress on Thursday secured a seat in the present Bengal assembly as its candidate Bayron Biswas won the Sagardighi bypoll, defeating the nearest rival of the Trinamool Congress by 22,980 votes.
Emerging from a "consultative" meeting chaired by Chief Minister E K Palaniswami, Finance Minister D Jayakumar declared that the "unanimous" decision was taken in tune with the aspirations of the party cadres and people.
In its first public protest, the O Panneerselvam-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam faction on Wednesday observed a day-long fast across Tamil Nadu demanding a probe into the death of J Jayalalithaa.
Madusudanan had been removed from all posts besides the primary membership for going against the party principles and bringing disrepute to it, she said in a statement in Chennai.
Sidelined AIADMK leader TTV Dinakaran sought to play down party's decision.
Scripting history, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday stormed to power in Assam bagging a government in the north east for the first time dethroning the Congress which also lost Kerala while Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee retained power in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal with spectacular victories.
Panneerselvam also remained firm on his faction's demand for a probe into late J Jayalalithaa's death.
Counting of votes is underway for four Lok Sabha and eight assembly Constituencies, spread across six states and one Union Territory where by-elections were held on Saturday.
Pandian alleged that Jaya died under unnatural circumstances and demanded a probe on her hospitalisation.
'Nobody is telling you not to speak or learn your mother tongue. But making other languages an emotional issue is wrong.'
As of now, there is nothing to suggest that the 'Michaelpatti episode' has the potential to polarise Dravidian Tamil Nadu on religious lines, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
M Karunanidhi was a masterful practitioner of modern-day politics, wielding considerable influence beyond his own state, in the corridors of power in New Delhi, for a long time and sewing up alliances with both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
For now, the BJP's strategy for Khushbu seems to be one of denial -- denying the rival Congress in the state and also at the national-level a Muslim voice acceptable to Hindu audiences and TV news-watchers. This is much less than the induction of DMK veterans like Duraiswamy and Selvam, who still have a greater chances of winning assembly seats,, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
With Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections, results for 51 assembly and two Lok Sabha bypolls spread across 18 states were declared on Thursday. Here are state-wise results of the bypolls.
In a major boost to Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, three All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Members of Parliament, state School Education Minister K Pandiarajan and veteran AIADMK leader and spokesman C Ponnaiyan on Saturday joined his dissident camp.
ndependent of the political fallout, which Stalin has sought to arrest through the withdrawal of the measures as fast as they were introduced, there are concerns about the way those decisions came to be taken, without adequate application of mind, not in official terms but in political and electoral contexts, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
As doctors treat Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, a different daily drama takes place outside the Apollo Hospitals gates.
The Rs 89 crore question before Tamil Nadu now is what shape a central intervention would take, and if there would be any role whatsoever for acting governor, Ch Vidyasagar Rao, in it, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'There are many people like me who were kept away from Jayalalithaa.' 'There is a coterie who did not allow her to meet people.'
Modi's NDA is good enough to give a psychological boost to the once 'untouchable' BJP and Modi but if the NDA doesn't get a majority on its own, then walking the last mile will be the greatest challenge of this election for Modi, says Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com
The costs involved in putting together a successful rally are bizarre.
The ruling AIADMK is leaving no stone unturned to win the Vellore Lok Sabha poll and push its tally to two in the state, with its candidate even donning the skull cap to woo minority votes. But the DMK's stars are clearly on the ascendant in the lone constituency that goes to the polls on August 5. A Ganesh Nadar reports.
Will the EC would make an example of the RK Nagar by-election, either by ensuring free and fair polls or by countermanding the same, asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
The revived factionalism in the AIADMK, if not curbed now, has the potential to split the party vertically, warns N Sathiya Moorthy.
Though EPS has sworn peace for now, or so it seems, his camp is said to be considering the possibility of calling an early meeting of the party's general council, to get a mandate in his favour before things went out of control. Ground-level indications are that OPS had lost his limited base, which alone had forced him to patch up with the other, reportedly at the instance of the BJP ally at the Centre, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'We have about Rs 4 lakh crore debt on a state budget of about Rs 1.5 lakh crore.' 'We are in a debt two-and-a-half times our annual budget,' says the banker who would have been Tamil Nadu's finance minister had the DMK won.
'I told him when I started my political career seven decades ago he was not even born. His political activities, the protests he organises and the way he fights the biggest corporate of India, the Ambanis, give hope to all people who are progressive. My desire is that such a party must grow, and I wished him all success for its growth.' V S Achuthanandan, the senior-most Communist in India, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier why he turned down Arvind Kejriwal's invitation to join the Aam Aadmi Party.
Stalin has given due respect to seniority in the pecking order, but has also taken into consideration the demands of individual ministries and the suitability of individuals, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Barring Maharashtra, the poll percentage in rest of the states was in excess of 60 per cent while in Puducherry it was 80.47 per cent.
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