The marathon meeting, spread over two sessions and kept under wraps, came a day after top leaders of socialist-leaning parties attended SP's silver jubilee meet here -- a move seen as an attempt by Mulayam to forge an alliance ahead of the assembly polls hardly a few months away.
'Balakot and Pulwama will definitely help the BJP, but it will still not help them to create a 2014 like situation or go beyond that.'
'Fighting terrorists is one thing. Fighting insurgents is worse. Fighting a population is worst of all,' says Mihir S Sharma.
The National Democratic Alliance, led by strong man Narendra Modi secured a whopping 352 of 542 seats, making it evident that his message of muscular nationalism, security and Hindu pride had worked wonders.
Mihir S Sharma gives us a rundown of what could happen, depending on the number.
'When you look at the content of Modi's speeches, the word 'Modi' is what he pronounces the most by far, which is not a healthy sign.'
'The fabric of democracy is fraying,' says T V R Shenoy. 'It is being attacked not just by terrorists in Kashmir or by zealots in the North-East, but is being ripped apart even in Allahabad, in the Hindi heartland.'
Desperate times need desperate actions, and the BJP's only option is to enforce legislation to build a Ram mandir, says Sunil Sethi.
'Vajpayee was predictable in his ways.' 'Modi is a schemer, possessed of a shrewdness that can be rewarding in the chaotic world of politics.' 'His political journey gives reason to believe that 2019 will be another milestone in his private project,' notes Vikram Johri.
The humility with which the BJP deals with these 10 lessons will determine the outcome of 2019, says Shekhar Gupta.
During his 15-year-tenure in the office, Chouhan transformed himself from being a shy, simple and vulnerable politician to a wily leader with mass appeal.
The winds of nationalism laden with religion will now yield to those of concern over the stalled economy, unemployment, and a general malaise and unhappiness, predicts Shekhar Gupta.
Priyanka Gandhi was earlier actively involved in key decision making in the party along with her mother and brother, including the selection of new chief ministers for Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh recently.
An analysis of the results in Haryana reveals that caste-based voting is anything but dead. It could even help the Bharatiya Janata Party win a second successive term in the state in the forthcoming assembly polls, reports Nitin Kumar.
All India Congress Committee general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad said the party would not react immediately and would come out with a detailed reaction in Lucknow on Sunday.
'In mocking him, Modi and Shah went horribly wrong.'
'It made Gandhi determined to fight to the finish, which now has the entire Sangh Parivar rattled,' says a Congress leader, privy to the repeated RSS outreach for a rapproachment.
While rising food inflation is a matter of grave concern for a significant chunk of the population and for policy makers as well, it marks a turnaround in the fortunes of the farmer, reports Sanjeeb Mukherjee.
Here's all you need to know about the man who could be India's next president.
'No amount of digression can hide deflect the fact that the PM's visit was badly conceived, planned and executed,' argues Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
M I Khan in Patna Nearly twelve years after he left the National Democratic Alliance and resigned from the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government after the Gujarat riots in 2002, Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan will share the dais with Gujarat Chief Minister and Bharatiya Janata party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi at his 'hunkar' rally in Bihar's Muzaffarpur town on Monday. Paswan, who joined the NDA last week to contest the Lok Sabha polls and took a U-turn on Modi, will appear in public with the BJP's top brass including Modi at the rally. Paswan's son Chirag will also be present at the function. Upendra Kushwaha is another new face that will be at the event. Kushwaha is the chief of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) that joined hands with the BJP last week. Both Paswan and Kushwaha are known as their own caste. Paswan is said to enjoy overwhelming support of his caste -- locally known as Dusadh, the only Dalit caste in Bihar after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar categorised 21 other Dalit castes as 'Mahadalit' -- poorest of the poor. Kushwaha has been trying hard for last few years to emerge as a leader of his caste -- Koeri, an agrarian backward caste spread across the state. A senior BJP leader said that presence of Paswan and Kushwaha will send a strong political massage among respective castes in Bihar. "It will strengthen the BJP's social support base in Bihar," he said. In Bihar, the BJP is widely seen as an upper caste party. The much-hyped rally is seen as a bid to mobilise support and strengthen the support base in the state. The state in the Hindi heartland that sends 40 Lok Sabha members to Parliament is politically very important. In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the party had won 12 seats, while the Janata Dal-United won 20 seats, when they had contested as a combined force. It is expected that Modi will target Kumar, who has openly opposed him by repeatedly saying that the prime ministerial candidate should be of nsecular credentials.
Is Stalin positioning himself as a central figure in the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party, anti-Narendra Modi formation?
'Why has the phrase gone missing from Modi's vocabulary?' asks Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
If the Congress manages to upset its dominant rival, the BJP, in these assembly polls, then it will be a big boost to the opposition for the Lok Sabha polls, while a good show by the BJP will energise its cadres and give a fillip to its hopes of retaining the power at the Centre in 2019.
'Many of us hope that India will soon play well enough to be part of truly global sporting tournaments like the football World Cup and the Olympics,' says Aakar Patel.
Congress leaders are confident that Priyanka would act as a catalyst for the party and boost the sagging morale of cadres to put up a spirited fight against the BJP and also the SP-BSP pre-poll alliance which had already shut its door on the Congress, reports Virendra Singh Rawat.
For the 2019 polls, the BJP chief deployed over 7,000 leaders to oversee the work of polling committees on the over 400 seats the BJP contested. These committees were asked to focus on 120 seats the party had lost in 2014, but believed it could win in 2019.
'Mahatma Gandhi, even for those on the extreme Hindu Right who believe he founded the politics of Muslim 'appeasement', is suicidal to target,' asserts Shekhar Gupta.
'Genuine mistakes can and must be forgiven,' argues Vivek Gumaste.
Modi-Shah BJP has resurrected dangers and the enemy from the past and built a scary jingoism. It's a great diversionary tactic but history shows it never ends well, points out Shekhar Gupta.
The names of several probables, including Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who had led the BJP government in the state in the past, were doing the rounds at the state party office.
It is possibly the first time that a regional party with not even enough numbers to move a no-trust motion has taken the lead, and others are following it. The hints of a no-trust move first came from the YSR Congress, and the ruling TDP could not have stayed on together when the question is another version of 'Telugu atma gouravam' - an issue that fired its founder N T Rama Rao in the 1980s, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Sebi suggested Roy be allowed to step out of Tihar jail for a few hours every day to negotiate the sale of his foreign properties over video conference.
The results are a ringing endorsement of Modi's popularity, his government's achievements in the last five years and his campaign, which centred around national security, nationalism and Hindutva.
'If Mr Modi and Mr Shah have made a poisonous, polarising campaign their brahmastra for 2019, Mamata Banerjee is showing them its limitations,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'They are innovating and a new Dalit leadership could be seen at the horizon'
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagging the "distressing rise" in incidents of Dalit atrocities.
'Let me stick my neck out and say that Tamil Nadu will keep alive its reputation for landslide election verdicts, with the DMK front winning at least 30 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats going to the polls in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry,' says Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
Gandhi, on the other hand, has also reached out directly to the party workers in the three states to know their top choice for the chief minister post through an internal mobile messaging app, party leaders said.
The names of a host of leaders, including some sitting MPs are doing the rounds in political circles.
Kamal Nath argued that Modi had 'overexposed himself': By constantly pushing his own image on social media and on TV, attaching his name to multiple promises, Modi had become the face rivals could easily blame for India's chronic dysfunction.
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